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Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

citusdata.com

11–20 of 156 posts

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#12
Being burned before,I will never use an OS infrastructure project that has enterprise features you need to pay for. They always try to move you to paid and make the OSS version unpleasant to use over time as soon as the bean counters take over to milk you

"For customers with large production deployments, we also offer an enterprise edition that comes with additional functionality"

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#13

If anyone from Citus is reading this: how does this affect your business model? I remember when I asked at Strata conf a couple of years ago why isn't your stuff Open Source, the answer then was "because revenue". So what changed since then?

My hunch is that the two are not really related.

Companies of any appreciable size will be happy to pay for support if they choose to make Citus a part of their critical infrastructure. And the industry reached an inflection point where there are enough companies want as much of their infrastructure to be open source as possible, that you can run a company where most of your stuff is open source, while still making a ton of money (like RedHat, CoreOS, Docker, etc)

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#14
post #4

This is awesome! Tebrikler (congrats) on the release of 5.0 and going OS, definitely great news. Can you publish competitive positioning of Citus vs Actian Matrix (nee ParAccel) and Vertica? I'd love to compare them side by side - even if it's just from your point of view :-)

Second the request for comparison to Vertica. I've recentishly become a user at work, and I wonder how this compares. A quick googling didn't yield anything too informative.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#15

If anyone from Citus is reading this: how does this affect your business model? I remember when I asked at Strata conf a couple of years ago why isn't your stuff Open Source, the answer then was "because revenue". So what changed since then?

It doesn't.

AGPL means the only people using it have to licensed the same.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#16
post #8
post #3

This is fantastic news! Postgres does not have a terribly strong High Availability story so far and of course it also does not scale out vertically. I have looked at CitusDB in the past, but was always put off by its closed-source nature. Opening it up seems like a great move for them and for all Postgres users. I can imagine that a very active open-source community will develop around it.

We've been running CitusDB for a couple years now at CloudFlare for serving aggregated analytics to customers (cf. https://blog.cloudflare.com/scaling-out-postgresql-for-cloud... ). It's a good product, and it was even fairly easy to do a major version upgrade / cluster relocation. At least as easy as such a thing can be. :-)

Are there any limitations you have run into? E.g. can you still use all index types that Postgres offers or are there any special distributed index types that CitusDB adds perhaps?

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#17

AGPL license if anyone's curious: https://github.com/citusdata/citus/blob/master/LICENSE

Does that mean that whatever connects to this database needs to be AGPL too?

No .. it means any changes you make to CitusDB should be made public.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#19

AGPL license if anyone's curious: https://github.com/citusdata/citus/blob/master/LICENSE

Does that mean that whatever connects to this database needs to be AGPL too?

No, it means if you make changes to the code and use it over a network you have to be AGPL too (think "network" as "distribution" in the GPL sense).

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#20
post #5

My guess is that Citus is making enough money from consulting that they don't need to keep this code closed source when they can profit from free community-driven growth while they are expanding their sales pipeline through consulting.

Hi, Craig from Citus here. In addition to the open source Citus, we have some premium features in our Enterprise edition. Many of these are ones that larger enterprises will want to pay for such as security features around roles, a tool for automated cluster resizing, and enhanced load balancing tools, and of course support. Beyond that we have a few other things in the work that will speak to various revenue models for the future.
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