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Datomic is Free

blog.datomic.com

151–160 of 436 posts

Re: Datomic is Free

#151
post #61

I guess NuBank (Cognitect's owners) have concluded that the paid licensing business wasn't worth the hassle compared to having the developer time involved spent on other things. Releasing only binaries, while I understand people being grumpy about it, seems like an interesting way of keeping their options open going forwards. Since it was always closed source, it now being 'closed source but free' is still a net win.…

Very probably they understood that having a property database makes hiring and onboarding more difficult than necessary. Open sourcing the database helps on that.

They didn’t open source the DB, just the binaries.

Re: Datomic is Free

#152
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?

You can attach any license text to anything, but most open-source license make little sense when applied to binaries. Like in this case, the Apache 2 license doesn't make distinction between the source and binary, referring to both as "the Work":

> 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, provided that (...)

Applying this only to their binaries directly contradicts what the license says.

Re: Datomic is Free

#153
post #61

I guess NuBank (Cognitect's owners) have concluded that the paid licensing business wasn't worth the hassle compared to having the developer time involved spent on other things. Releasing only binaries, while I understand people being grumpy about it, seems like an interesting way of keeping their options open going forwards. Since it was always closed source, it now being 'closed source but free' is still a net win.…

Very probably they understood that having a property database makes hiring and onboarding more difficult than necessary. Open sourcing the database helps on that.

they haven't open sourced the database though?

Re: Datomic is Free

#154
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very probably they understood that having a property database makes hiring and onboarding more difficult than necessary. Open sourcing the database helps on that.

They didn’t open source the DB, just the binaries.

How can you "open source" something that doesn't include the sources?

Re: Datomic is Free

#155
post #100
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.

"Easy" vs "comprehensible" is exactly the trade-off Haskell makes: it might be difficult to learn, but it's easy to reason about once you learn it. (Of course, both sides of that equation come with their own caveats...)

Re: Datomic is Free

#156

Aside, I remember HN in 2009 or so where Clojure was a daily homepage staple and Rich Hickey was putting out his talks about Clojure and code design. I watched a lot of that and used Clojure fulltime for five years. Wonder what he's up to these days.

>used Clojure fulltime for five years. How did that work out for you? Usually following a hype cycle, there is a negative hype cycle i.e. Mongo is webscale, then Mongo is a buggy mess. Clojure seemed to just fade away. Did it turn out well or are there interesting pitfalls that make it not as great as advertised?

Clojure is just really niche. Even an ecosystem that stays the same size overtime is dwarfed by the continually growing, continually polished competitor ecosystems that will pull people from the small niches.

The best things about Clojure are things you don't really appreciate until you've already done the work to learn them.

For example, I never would have known how amazing it was to evaluate code inside the editor until I did the work of learning Emacs + evil-mode + nrepl/cider + whatever so that I could spin up my http server in-process and then modify code without restarting everything. Even today I'm doing `nodemon index.ts` like a goofball.

I stopped using Clojure simply when I met someone who wanted to build some big projects with me and, despite appreciating that Clojure was probably amazing, they simply couldn't be bothered to learn it. Fair enough. It was when Javascript was just getting `yield` coroutines (before async/await) which finally made Javascript bearable for me enough to switch to it for server work.

Clojure just has increasingly compelling languages and ecosystems to compete with, yet it has a huge ramp up, being a lisp, that make it hard for people to choose it.

Just consider how, to even write Clojure comfortably, you really need something like Paredit. Else, what exactly are you going to do if you want to nest or unnest a (form) deeper in the ast structure? Manually rebalance parens? Cut and paste it? Only Paredit lets you easily move a (form) around the ast. And it's amazing but yet another tool you have to learn just to truly evaluate Clojure.

Re: Datomic is Free

#157
post #125

Is SQLite Wasm on the horizon?

Curious why you're asking this question when it seems to have little to do with Datomic going "free"? Did you mean Datomic WASM on the horizon? Or am I missing some other connection between SQLite and Datomic?

Re: Datomic is Free

#158
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).

So is any cloud-managed db offering and at that scale we talking very small costs anyway.

Why datomic instead?

Re: Datomic is Free

#160
post #28

I really like Clojure and the ideas behind Datomic but free without source is a trap, every time. They have to make money somehow, but they already sold to a bank. If that bank wants devs willing to work on their systems after the current generation moves on, I think they'd be better off going open source and to continue paying good devs to work on it. Everyone already knows lock-in is bad for businesses. Devs will s…

You could look into http://xtdb.com/ if you want an open source alternative
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