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Datomic is Free

blog.datomic.com

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Re: Datomic is Free

#111

Post by jchw »

nerdponx wrote: post #86
jchw wrote: post #30

Not complaining about the actual announcement itself here: seems pretty sweet all things considered, But: the "Is it Open Source?" section should lead with "No." It's not a complicated question, and it's not a complicated answer. I think it's weird to talk about having "all the same rights" without explaining why that matters particularly (it does matter, it's just not explained much!) but it is somewhat tangential t…

I didn't realize it was possible to release binaries under a different license from the source code that generated them. In this case, is the "source code" just the physical machine code or bytecode in the binary?

Disclaimer; I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.

A copyright license is a copyright license: in theory, all a copyright license does is give you additional rights to use something. Using a license like Apache 2 for binaries is somewhat unconventional, but it's totally possible. It (obviously) does not give you access to the source code, and I think this could never work with the GPL and other copyleft licenses because they use wording that implies you need to distrubute the source code, which you don't have.

The copyright owner, of course, has ownership, so their obligations don't really change by virtue of giving someone a copyright license. As far as I know, they could give someone a license to use something that is completely invalid and could never actually be used, and they can definitely do things like stop distributing under one license and switch to another. They own the source code, and they own the binaries (I believe the binaries would be considered a sort of derivative work in copyright terms, but again, not a lawyer.) So when they distribute a binary under a given license, it's unrelated to any particular distribution of source code. The only time this gets complex is when the ownership of a asset is split among many disparate parties, at which point everyone is pretty much beholden to the copyright licenses; like open source projects without CLAs. But if they own the source code entirely, they could, for example, distribute some source code under GPL, but then distribute modified binaries under a commercial license with a EULA, and not redistribute the modified source code, since it's their code to license to others, not a license they are subjected to themselves.

Re: Datomic is Free

#112

Post by frou_dh »

moomin wrote: post #100
frou_dh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case then all the people running around praising the ""simplicity"" of golang got the wrong end of the stick completely from Rich's classic presentations.

The thing is, Hickey was entirely right to reject this idea of “Simplicity” being the same thing as “Easy”. But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics. Turns out if you really focus on composability above other concerns you get Haskell.

> But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics.

Did he? I seem to remember a quip in one of the presentations about German not being comprehensible to him being his own problem, because he never learned German.

Re: Datomic is Free

#113

Post by mbreese »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #107
jchw wrote: post #30

Not complaining about the actual announcement itself here: seems pretty sweet all things considered, But: the "Is it Open Source?" section should lead with "No." It's not a complicated question, and it's not a complicated answer. I think it's weird to talk about having "all the same rights" without explaining why that matters particularly (it does matter, it's just not explained much!) but it is somewhat tangential t…

I am not a lawyer, but doesn't the Apache license specifically grant the right to redistribute the source code? > You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form

But what if you never had the source form? You can’t redistribute what you never had…

This is actually an interesting question. But I can’t see how a binary only distribution would be in the spirit of the Apache license.

Re: Datomic is Free

#114

Post by xpe »

a2800276 wrote: post #10
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that answer confusing. I don't think I've ever seen binaries being licensed under Apache 2 without the relevant source code before.

Yeah, it's a complete bullshit move. Mongoose OS (an embedded iot Plattform not the db) does something similar. It's extremely weasely and doesn't instill trust at all.

Trust is not the same for everyone. One model of trust is: A trusts B to do C.

Nubank is releasing the binary permissively. You might want more, but this is not a breach of trust.

Datomic has been around for more than 10 years, so there is ample data to base expectations.

Re: Datomic is Free

#115

Post by dimitar »

electroly wrote: post #53
augustl wrote: post #11

Datomic's is perfect for probably 90% of small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale (i.e. most of what I do at work). Writing in a single thread removes a whole host of problems in understanding (and implementing) how data changes over time. (And a busy MVCC sql db spends 75% of its time doing coordination, not actual writes, so a single thread applying a queue of transactions in sequence can be fast…

> Someone needs to have the working set of your database in memory, why shouldn't it be your app server and business logic? This one confused me. The obvious reason why you don't want the whole working set of your database in the app server's memory is because you have lots of app servers, whereas you only have one database[1]. This suggests that you put the working set of the database in the database , so that you s…

Consider this use case - in addition to your web app, you have a reporting service that makes heavy duty reports; if you run one at a bad time, bad things might happen like users not being able to log in or do any other important work, because the database is busy with the reports.

So in a traditional DB you might have a DBA set up a reporting database so the operational one is not affected. Using Datomic the reporting service gets a datomic peer that has a copy of the DB in database without any extra DBA work and without affecting any web services. This also works nicely with batch jobs or in any situation where you don't want to have different services affect each others performance.

Its true that a lot more memory gets used, but it is relatively cheap - usually the biggest cost when hosting in the cloud being the vCPUs. But usually in Clojure/Datomic web application you don't need to put various cache services like Redis in front of your DB.

Thea assumption here is that the usual bottleneck for most information systems and business applications is reading and querying data.

Re: Datomic is Free

#116

Post by Scarbutt »

dagw wrote: post #98
adamfeldman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: https://www.datomic.com/nubanks-story.html

Worth keeping in mind that Nubank owns the company that makes Datomic, so that might colour their opinion. On the flip side they probably wouldn't have bought the company if they thought their product was crap.

My guess is they bought the company because they were already too invested in Datomic. So it was kind of forced to minimize risk.

Re: Datomic is Free

#117

Post by harperlee »

xpe wrote: post #101
harperlee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps security by obscurity, it being now a proprietary component of a bank?

There are valid reasons not to release the source code that have nothing to do with “security by obscurity”: legal, various notions of “control”, and more

And I’d add that security by obscurity is also a valid reason. It’s bad as a standalone strategy, but good as a complementary strategy.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444497

Re: Datomic is Free

#118

Post by xpe »

augustl wrote: post #11

Datomic's is perfect for probably 90% of small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale (i.e. most of what I do at work). Writing in a single thread removes a whole host of problems in understanding (and implementing) how data changes over time. (And a busy MVCC sql db spends 75% of its time doing coordination, not actual writes, so a single thread applying a queue of transactions in sequence can be fast…

> Datomic's is perfect for probably 90% of small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale (i.e. most of what I do at work).

I don’t think I agree with this as stated. It is too squishy and subjective to say “perfect”.

More broadly, the above is not and should not be a cognitive “anchor point” for reasonable use cases for Datomic. Making that kind of claim requires a lot more analysis and persuasion.

Re: Datomic is Free

#119

Post by panick21_ »

mbesto wrote: post #54
adamfeldman wrote: post #3

What is Datomic, you ask? It's a database written in Clojure. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=datomic Datomic is an operational database management system - designed for transactional, domain-specific data. It is not designed to be a data warehouse, nor a high-churn high-throughput system (such as a time-series database or log store). It is a good fit for systems that store valuable information of record, require developer…

For 90% of the web devs that just spin up Postgres/MySQL, why would you use Datomic over that?

Because its a different model of integrating your database and your app.

It allows you to write queries in a pull style, it can be trigger based, datalog or raw index access. Its by default immutable and allows historical query. It allows meta data on the transaction themselves.

A lot of the time the user builds much of that himself or relays on frameworks to do it.

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