Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Datomic is Free

blog.datomic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 436 posts

Re: Datomic is Free

#21

Post by oh_sigh »

mqus wrote: post #15
NickBusey wrote: post #2

Free as in beer. Not free as in speech. > Is it Open Source? Datomic binaries are provided under the Apache 2 license which grants all the same rights to a work delivered in object form. Datomic will continue to be developed at Nubank, where it is a critical piece of our infrastructure.

> perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form. Doesn't this mean, that, as soon as I (somehow) get hold of the source code, I can distribute it as I want?

Probably not, because the source is not a derivative. Having said that, if you decompile the binary I bet you could distribute that source.

Re: Datomic is Free

#22

Post by cjbprime »

oh_sigh wrote: post #21
mqus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form. Doesn't this mean, that, as soon as I (somehow) get hold of the source code, I can distribute it as I want?

Probably not, because the source is not a derivative. Having said that, if you decompile the binary I bet you could distribute that source.

"distribute the Work [..] in Source [..] form"

Re: Datomic is Free

#23

Post by Pet_Ant »

frou_dh wrote: post #18
a2800276 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

There is nothing wrong with saying "It is not open source but you can freely use the binaries". That is the same thing, but upfront about it, but this feels like open-source-washing.

Re: Datomic is Free

#24

Post by lib-dev »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #14

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.

Those talks inspired far more than Clojure itself. It sort of started this movement toward simplicity as a value.

Re: Datomic is Free

#25

Post by eternalban »

martypitt wrote: post #6

Only the binaries are made available, not the source, which is interesting. I guess they don't claim to be open source, they're claiming to be free, which is - in itself - awesome. Last time I checked, you couldn't push binaries to maven central, without also releasing the source. That may have changed.

Someone (forget who but he worked there) was giving a presentation of Datomics in some downtown (NYC) bank circa 2014 iirc. Per the presenter -- iirc someone asked a specific technical question -- even people working for the company don't get to see the full source. Only a small team has access to the full source, and he said he wasn't one of them.

Re: Datomic is Free

#26

Post by a2800276 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #23
frou_dh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is nothing wrong with saying "It is not open source but you can freely use the binaries". That is the same thing, but upfront about it, but this feels like open-source-washing.

Nothing wrong with that at all. But that's not what was said. Answering the question (that you posed to yourself in your own FAQ): "Is it Open Source?" by stating: "we've licensed the binary using an Open Source license" seems a bit disingenuous. A more matter-of-factly answer would have been: "No".

Re: Datomic is Free

#27

Post by casion »

martypitt wrote: post #6

Only the binaries are made available, not the source, which is interesting. I guess they don't claim to be open source, they're claiming to be free, which is - in itself - awesome. Last time I checked, you couldn't push binaries to maven central, without also releasing the source. That may have changed.

Maven actually has a tutorial on publishing binaries without source. So I assume it's ok when they tell you how to do it.

Re: Datomic is Free

#28

Post by kgwxd »

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 seek non-proprietary solutions first, if they can't find it, there are already plenty of proven proprietary solutions they'll settle on way before Datomic. Open the source, sell the support.

Re: Datomic is Free

#29

Post by oh_sigh »

cjbprime wrote: post #22
oh_sigh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, because the source is not a derivative. Having said that, if you decompile the binary I bet you could distribute that source.

"distribute the Work [..] in Source [..] form"

I took that to mean the form provided by the authors - eg the "binary source"

Re: Datomic is Free

#30

Post by jchw »

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 to the question being posed which has a very clear and straightforward answer.

I hope more companies consider this unusual arrangement at least as an alternative to other approaches. Permissively licensed binaries can come in handy, though it certainly comes with it's risks. For example, Microsoft released the binaries for its WebView2 SDK under the BSD license; this is nice of course, but the side-effect is that we can (and did) reverse engineer the loader binary back to source code. I suspect that's unlikely to happen for any substantially large commercial product, and I am not a lawyer so I can't be sure this isn't still legally dubious, but it's still worth considering: the protections of a EULA are completely gone here, if you just distribute binaries under a vanilla permissive open source license.

Post reply on HN