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Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

altinity.com

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Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#21

Post by sylvinus »

bitshiftin wrote: post #14
sylvinus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the author is indeed trying to contribute back, that is the whole point: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/54644

In 4 years, the author has raised 6 issues and zero PRs. The latest issue was raised last week to inflame this same argument and is 4x longer than any previous issue.

I don't know him but most of his GitHub activity seems to be contributing to the ClickHouse ecosystem, including popular projects like this one: https://github.com/Altinity/clickhouse-operator

My point is just that he doesn't appear to be someone complaining and not contributing.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#22

Post by tylerhannan »

devoxi wrote: post #19
lairv wrote: post #15

How do you chose between ClickHouse and DuckDB ? It feels like they solve the same problem

They are both columnar data stores and while they solve the same problem I wouldn't use them in the same situation. DuckDB is often referred as the sqlite of analytics, meaning that it's lightweight and you can embed it. On the other hand ClickHouse is definitely the way to go if you need to distribute your queries over multiple servers. If your workload can be held on a single server and you only need standard SQL f…

also clickhouse-local exists...https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...

FWIW, you can checkout clickbench.com is a benchmark of parquet, partitioned of ClickHouse and DuckDB

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#23

Post by dartos »

Sphax wrote: post #5
bitshiftin wrote: post #4

The blog author founded altinity. Altinity's main product offering is a hosted clickhouse service. The top 10 committers to clickhouse all seem to be clickhouse employees. Looking at altinity on github, they contribute much less open source. If clickhouse the company are spending 40%+ of their money to build the product, then others including altinity spend 5% dev and 80% marketing, they will get more customers. That…

Exactly. I have no problem with open source developers shifting to an open core model so they can get paid, even if it means I as a user don't get these new features for free.

I like what directus does. They release their source code under a restrictive license (you need to pay if you make more than so much money) with a timer. After 3 years of any release the license changes to GPL.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#24

Post by hodgesrm »

bitshiftin wrote: post #4

The blog author founded altinity. Altinity's main product offering is a hosted clickhouse service. The top 10 committers to clickhouse all seem to be clickhouse employees. Looking at altinity on github, they contribute much less open source. If clickhouse the company are spending 40%+ of their money to build the product, then others including altinity spend 5% dev and 80% marketing, they will get more customers. That…

CEO of Altinity here, also editor of the blog article. It would be more interesting to address the points that it raises. If you are an open source user of ClickHouse, do you really want basic features like object storage for tables or ability to delete data efficiently withheld?

This question is important regardless of who raises it. Projects like Kafka, Spark, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes (among others) have solved it while allowing good returns to those who contribute.

p.s., We spent 7% of budget on marketing last month. A sizable fraction of our budget is devoted to open source contributions ClickHouse and ecosystem projects.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#25

Post by ethbr1 »

3np wrote: post #7
bitshiftin wrote: post #4

The blog author founded altinity. Altinity's main product offering is a hosted clickhouse service. The top 10 committers to clickhouse all seem to be clickhouse employees. Looking at altinity on github, they contribute much less open source. If clickhouse the company are spending 40%+ of their money to build the product, then others including altinity spend 5% dev and 80% marketing, they will get more customers. That…

Yeah, so, if maintainers started blocking external contributions for business reasons or changed the license of the upstream repo, that would be a legitimate concern. If this blog post raises any legitimate concerns, I missed them. All I see is entitlement to continue get work for free. If you're concerned about gaps in ClickHouse functionality, maybe pick up the slack and contribute back? It takes a village to raise…

Ignoring any arguments to the author/company, the big question is "What does ClickHouse do, if there's a PR from the community reimplementing a cloud-only/closed feature?"

The problem with open core is there's no great answer.

Either it's merged, in which case there are now two codebases implementing the same feature (one open, one closed), and the company's revenue stream is imperiled.

Or it's rejected (either explicitly or quietly ignored), in which case work is wasted and the project is less useful than it could be.

How did open core companies historically handle this?

As ugly as it is, it feels like permissive OSS (e.g. MIT) core + open but anti-SaaS non-OSS cloud-only/closed feature is a more sustainable model that encourages development in the open.

E.g. an MIT-alike license for select features that says "free-as-in-beer license up to X users, otherwise talk to our sales team and get a commercial license"

At the end of the day, I want OSS to succeed and be great, but especially nowadays that takes a large team, which takes funding, which requires a competitive revenue model.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#26

Post by rjzzleep »

bitshiftin wrote: post #4

The blog author founded altinity. Altinity's main product offering is a hosted clickhouse service. The top 10 committers to clickhouse all seem to be clickhouse employees. Looking at altinity on github, they contribute much less open source. If clickhouse the company are spending 40%+ of their money to build the product, then others including altinity spend 5% dev and 80% marketing, they will get more customers. That…

Altinity maintains the ClickHouse operator which got a lot of people to use ClickHouse to begin with. ClickHouse has had a lot of corner cases that were reported from those kinds of people, myself included.

If you look at some of the discussions, while a lot of the fixes come from the clickHouse team it would be unjust to say that the corner case discussions don't contribute to the fixes.

I think part of the reason is that ClickHouse, being sort of a unique offering brings with its users sometimes a quite competent bunch that go beyond the "I want this feature, please implement".

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#27

Post by hodgesrm »

devoxi wrote: post #19
lairv wrote: post #15

How do you chose between ClickHouse and DuckDB ? It feels like they solve the same problem

They are both columnar data stores and while they solve the same problem I wouldn't use them in the same situation. DuckDB is often referred as the sqlite of analytics, meaning that it's lightweight and you can embed it. On the other hand ClickHouse is definitely the way to go if you need to distribute your queries over multiple servers. If your workload can be held on a single server and you only need standard SQL f…

Duckdb has also gotten mindshare as an engine to read Parquet from data lakes. The fact that it's embeddable enables some very creative uses. It helped that for a time DuckDB was substantially quicker than ClickHouse on reading Parquet. That advantage has eroded with recent improvements on ClickHouse Parquet support. I expect the gap will close quickly.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#28

Post by joshxyz »

hodgesrm wrote: post #24
bitshiftin wrote: post #4

The blog author founded altinity. Altinity's main product offering is a hosted clickhouse service. The top 10 committers to clickhouse all seem to be clickhouse employees. Looking at altinity on github, they contribute much less open source. If clickhouse the company are spending 40%+ of their money to build the product, then others including altinity spend 5% dev and 80% marketing, they will get more customers. That…

CEO of Altinity here, also editor of the blog article. It would be more interesting to address the points that it raises. If you are an open source user of ClickHouse, do you really want basic features like object storage for tables or ability to delete data efficiently withheld? This question is important regardless of who raises it. Projects like Kafka, Spark, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes (among others) have solved i…

i appreciate your work here man, altinity even wrote a lot of useful blog posts about clickhouse back then, love those stuff.

this whole thing reminds me of elastic and hashicorp, and it's hard to pick sides given that the core maintainers also worked their assess of building it in public, and the community contributors also put their effort into it.

i think this common theme is unlocking a new era of software where core maintainers productize the main product slapped with a bsl license and the community (incl other businesses) maintain their own fork.

it's great that discussions like this are being brought up and talked about.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#29

Post by paulryanrogers »

up2isomorphism wrote: post #13

The inherited advantage of being closed source in the first places is that you will not be accused of “moving away” from open source. We never see Microsoft office or Apple MacOS moving away from open source.

MacOS (X) was once more open than it is now. It is a shame they have locked more away behind a closed license.

Re: Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?

#30

Post by unamedrus »

bitshiftin wrote: post #16
sylvinus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a kind of survivorship bias here! I'm sure that if Altinity (or others) weren't forced to do RFCs on GitHub like the one mentioned in this article that get low/no attention from the core team, they would be in the top committers :)

"forced to do RFCs on GitHub" The author has raised 1 RFC ever. Have you evidence they attemnpted to contribute more in the past? Proposals to form a steering committee? sponsorship? PRs?

Are you part of ClickHouse community, ever used that DBMS or participate in any activity related it?

Just to make sure, we are on the same page.

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