19 ms·

An update to the Timescale license

427 points by bithavoc 6y ago

eloff 6y ago
It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it. That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses that really should be addressed. Until then I expect this kind of almost-FOSS license to become more popular in the future. We're seeing it from many of the recently founded open-source companies in the cloud era.
- aloknnikhil 6y ago
  And not to mention profiting off of the patches and fixes the maintainers provide and almost never contributing back. I am definitely happy to see attempts to help the creators.
- nautilus12 6y ago
  Its kind of tricky, in terms of the license how do you end up with that practical limitation? IE how do you distinguish a company thats "too big" (like amazon) to be likely to just be predatorially taking advantage of OSS, vs others.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Many new open source companies, like Timescale, Cockroach Labs are going with a managed cloud service offering as their business model. Even RethinkDB pivoted in that direction, although too late in the game for them to survive. So one could make an open-source license specifically reserving that freedom for the creators only. There are probably other business models one could try to protect. The basic idea I think is give as much freedom as possible while also providing some protection for specific use cases that allow the creators to be compensated for their work. It benefits nobody if you create a wild west of freedoms that deny creators a way to finance their work.
  - mfreed 6y ago
    Thanks for question. One of the things that Timescale License does (similar with Elastic, Confluent Community, etc.) is to define a "Value Added Service", and basically say you can utilize/distribute the database as part of a SaaS service or product provided that it's a Value Added Service/Product, and basically just isn't offering the (in our case) "TimescaleDB-as-a-Service". Then it becomes a bit of reading the actual definition in the license. In our case: https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-added-products-or-services https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-... Unlike the other licenses, we tried to couch part of this definition is specific details that engineers could understand, e.g. "(iii) users of such Value Added Products or Services are prohibited, either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database objects, such as through use of the Timescale Data Definition Interfaces, in a Timescale Database utilized by such Value Added Products or Services." So basically one important test would be: if your SaaS service is defining the data schema, indexes, etc., all good. If your users have arbitrary DDL access to the database and do this all themselves, that would "classify" as a "database-as-a-service" offering under this definition.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Hopefully the CockroachDB folks are reading this too. The features set behind the enterprise only license seem arbitrary
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    These are never arbitrary. They are almost always the result of a lot of internal discussions the outcome of which no one is really happy with.
  - sandstrom 6y ago
    Agree, they don't even have backups in the non-enterprise license.
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      They don’t have incremental backups. You are of course able to dump the tables, and it’s fully compatible with postgresql export utilities.
- sytse 6y ago
  This is certainly a great improvement in the license! Kudos to TimescaleDB. I wonder if the new license allows us to offer services on top of TimescaleDB in a multi-tenant setting. GitLab.com has metric monitoring https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ and we're considering using TimescaleDB to store these. We would not offer direct access to the database. The relevant section in the license https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses seems to be the prohibition to "provide any form of software-as-a-service or service offering in which the TSL Licensed Software is offered or made available to third parties to provide time-series database functions or operations, other than as part of Your Value Added Products or Services". I'm not sure if metrics count as time-series database functions or operations.
  - mfreed 6y ago
    I posted below, but an important check really is the definition of the "Value Added Product or Service". https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-added-products-or-services https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-... On its face, it sounds like your use case is totally allowed under the TSL (and in fact, since the TSL was initially launched in Dec 2018). We have plenty of users who build commercially-available monitoring products/services on top of TimescaleDB. Happy to help if you'd like - our engineers are always available in our Slack Channel: https://slack.timescale.com/ https://slack.timescale.com/ UPDATED: Ha! I didn't realize I was responding to the CEO of GitLab. =)
    - cbaleanu 6y ago
      And that is why HN is my favorite part of the net for about a decade now :)
    - sytse 6y ago
      Thanks for the clarification, glad to hear it is allowed.
      - camkego 6y ago
- GordonS 6y ago
  Yep, they even quoted some recent HN comments in the article. I have absolutely no doubt that a small but vocal minority will remain unsatisfied. I'm not surprised by this move, as there was barely anything left in the Enterprise license anyway. Personally, I think this is a great move, and one that should in theory leave that vocal minority with very little to actually grumble about.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    I likely qualify as "vocal minority". These changes make TimescaleDB something I could entertain using. My concerns related to the "right-to-repair" / "right-to-improve", and with vendor lock-in. These changes address my concerns handily.
- Netcob 6y ago
  Maybe that's just the natural progression for technologies that are dependencies of other technologies. As a software business you don't want to depend on too many pieces of software (or hardware) that you have little to no control over. Linux is the best example of a solution for that problem - even the tech giants won't bother making their own OS anymore if there is already one out there that they can use and modify. And ISAs (RISC-V) will probably follow that route too. What's interesting though is that businesses seem to be unable to initiate that progress on their own. You need those vocal FOSS people for that, who will tirelessly drag technology towards an ideal we'll never reach... but nobody else will get the ball rolling. FOSS as the basis for entire ecosystems of businesses that would have never existed without it makes total sense, but no business will create it out of thin air. I think this gradual opening up like with TimescaleDB is simply an effect of the wind blowing in that direction. Few will be going full speed, but nobody wants to be left behind.
- est31 6y ago
  > No right to distribute modified Source Still seems like a serious issue to me.
  - rbjorklin 6y ago
    How so? To me it seems like a clause like it is required to protect their business from the "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" scenario.
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      I mean... that's fine if that's what their business requires. It just isn't open source. It's "source available" or "shared source" or something. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as everybody is up-front about what it is. Edit: to qualify what I just said... I obviously only mean that IF their license doesn't also allow distribution of patch files. You can be OSI compliant and not allow distribution of the modified source as a "whole" so long as you allow distribution of the patches needed to get to the modified source. I didn't notice at a brief glance where the "new" (or old) Timescale license falls on this point.
      - est31 6y ago
        Yeah it's perfectly fine that they make a product under this license, as going full closed source would be perfectly fine as well. But it's not open source.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Yes, it is necessary to prevent the core purpose of open source. Which is fine, proprietary licenses are a valid option. Just don’t pretend it's almost open source. It's a source-available proprietary license designed to prevent the kind of exclusionary rent-extraction whose absence is central to the value proposition of open source.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it. That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses that really should be addressed Then use AGPL?
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    How does AGPL address this?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      The original problem was Amazon "leeching off their software without paying for it". If Amazon shares their changes (as the AGPL requires), then they're contributing, not leeching. If the problem is just that Amazon happens to use a product, or horror of horrors, offer a hosted version... I dunno, I just can't see what the issue is. Is every developer upset about people profiting off their work sending a monthly check to Linus Torvalds for using Linux, Apple for clang and/or GNU for gcc, and the maintainers of their distro of choice? Or is only their software that nobody else is allowed to make money off of?
      - ivalm 6y ago
        Timescaledb the company wants to make money from their managed service, thus they are protecting it from competition. That’s fine. They are not true open source but that’s fine too.
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Agreed. I don't mind companies selling proprietary software. I do mind companies trying to claim that they're offering open source software when they're actually offering source-available software. With the Apache2 version, Timescale actually appears to be doing both, but I can't find a description of the differences so I can't comment very well; I assume they're doing open core. Which, again, is fine as long as you don't try and pretend that you're doing something else.
- geofft 6y ago
  I've been vocal in the past about using an OSI-approved license for one very specific practical reason: it gets you the ability to be packaged for Linux distros etc. that have policies that match the OSI definition (usually by having terms that match the OSI's current definition, not by delegating the decision to the OSI). In my opinion, that's important for adoption - not as important as it used to be in years past, yes, but still important. Even if production users are going to want to run the latest version (or run a commercially-supported binary), the ability to apt-get install something on your laptop to test it has value, as does the ability for other pieces of software in a Linux distro to depend on it. That said, given that they're following a more-or-less "open core" model where there's a clearly FOSS portion (Apache 2) and some non-FOSS extra features on top, I don't think that this is going to be a practical barrier. It looks like the Apache 2 portion of Timescale is substantial enough that you can package it in Linux distros and use it. So in this particular case, I think it doesn't matter whether the rest of it is technically "open source" - it very clearly isn't going to be accepted by Linux distros, and it very clearly is fine for its intended users, and both of those are okay.
  - akx 6y ago
    With the release cadence of the current major distros vs the pace at which software is released, it doesn't seem to be worth it to get your stuff in the official repos, to quickly be several major versions behind. You can package debs or rpms for easy install, host them on a server (or set up an apt/rpm repo) just fine even if they're not FOSS.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. I don't have a dog in this fight, so to speak, as I'm not a user of Timescale. All I'll say is that I hate to see license proliferation in general, and I don't think people should refer to things as "Open Source" if they aren't using an OSI compliant license. To me, if I see a project that's using anything other than a well known, well understood, OSI sanctioned license, I get the heebie-jeebies - because I don't know what the license permits. And I don't want to invest time trying to understand the nuances and ins-and-outs of every random project specific license that comes along. So props to Timescale for making what appear to be improvements to their license. But I'll always advocate using an off-the-shelf license when/where possible. shrug
  - fastball 6y ago
    > because I don't know what the license permits That's why you read it...
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      Yes, and then, if I'm smart, spend time and money discussing it with attorneys and/or other experts, who will probably tell me that they don't know either, because there is no body of case law concerning this new and unique "special snowflake" of a license..., etc, etc. Of course I could just "wing it", read through it, and work off my layman's interpretation and hope for the best. Or.. I could choose to stick to well understood and well known licenses that already exist.
      - GordonS 6y ago
        I agree in general that reading licenses as a lay person can be problematic. In this case though, TimescaleDB has blog posts that describe the license in very plain language, and provide clear examples of what you can and can't do - you can basically do anything except provide it as a service. No need to "wing it".
        6y ago
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  > I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Don't forget that Timescale can alter the terms of their license at any time. That's the material difference from an OSI-approved license. Here's the relevant term of the TSL Agreement. Emphasis mine: > (c) Distribution of Source Code or Binaries in Standalone Form. Subject to the prohibitions in Section 2.2 below, a license to copy and distribute the Timescale Software source code and binaries solely in unmodified standalone form and subject to the terms and conditions of the most current version of this TSL Agreement.
  - akulkarni 6y ago
    Not really. Modifications only apply to next versions, doesn't change to prior versions: The modified agreement shall govern any new version of the TSL Licensed Software (and all its constituent source code and binaries) that is officially released as a complete version release by Timescale on or after such Posted Date. https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-7-2-modification https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-7-2-modific...
    - hodgesrm 6y ago
      Thanks, I was looking for that and could not find it. The point remains that there's nothing to protect users from changes in licenses like the TSL. It's possible with FOSS licenses provided you own all copyrights but much less likely.
- ramses0 6y ago
  https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#The_guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline... The litmus test has always been: "while you may not want your software used in a weapon of mass destruction (or other purpose you don't agree with), it is not free software / open source unless it can be used for that purpose" ... those are items #5 and #6 in the DFSG guidelines. While Mr. Torvalds may have been a much richer man if he prohibited "Linux as a Service", it was the unrestricted freedom given by the GPL which allowed companies like Amazon/AWS to use Linux in the first place.
  - igneo676 6y ago
    This. It boils down to "words mean things". They're fine being firmly on the side of proprietary-with-some-preservation-of-rights; it is _their_ code after all. Their customers get to decide what level of rights they're happy with putting up with. They're not Open Source. They're not Free Software. Being part of those communities requires following the norms of those communities.
    - ramses0 6y ago
      (people forget how radical `Copyleft` was at the time of its inception!)
    - mfreed 6y ago
      Appreciate the sentiment. We try pretty hard to be careful to not describe the Timescale Licensed code as Open Source, and typically refer to it as "source available". Of course, a big portion of our code is licensed under Apache 2, which clearly does qualify. From the Timescale License, for example: https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-0-background https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-0-backgroun... Thanks!
      - igneo676 6y ago
- ensignavenger 6y ago
  The new Timescale License doesn't only restrict AWS, it restricts anyone not Timescale from offering management services for the Timescale Licensed code. It restricts customers who find that Timescale is unable or unwilling to support them in an agree-able manner from paying some one else to manage it for them. All that is fine and dandy- it is clear that Timescale is open-core, with an Apache-licensed core and proprietary components, just like gitlab and other products. (Timescale is a bit more generous with their proprietary code, though, so that's nice). I will stick with strongly favoring building on open source code, myself, despite this generous offer of no-fee license to use their proprietary software.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    > It restricts customers who find that Timescale is unable or unwilling to support them in an agree-able manner from paying some one else to manage it for them. It restricts Customers from going to a Timescale-as-a-Service provider, but I don't see how it restricts the Customer from contracting to have a third-party support the Customer's Timescale installation (or to make changes to the codebase as a work-for-hire). I agree w/ your assessment of their new license insofar as it being proprietary. Their old proprietary license made the product unacceptable for my use, but I am comfortable with the limitations to my rights with the new proprietary license. It has enough "right-to-repair" and ability to avoid vendor lock-in to make me feel comfortable that I could maintain a private fork of my use case was dependent on their software. Edit: My first paragraph was a quick-and-dirty. The child post is absolutely right. The license restricts Customers from providing Timescale-as-a-Service services.
    - doctor_eval 6y ago
      As I understand it, it doesn’t restrict customers from going to a TSAAS provider, it simply means that if you want to provide TSAAS then you need to negotiate a different license from Timescale. The only restriction is that you can’t (necessarily) provide TSAAS for free. To me that’s free as in speech but not free as in beer, and is well within my personal understanding of “free software”. As the saying goes, the right to speech doesn’t imply the right to be heard; likewise, the right to inspect and modify software doesn’t necessarily imply the right to profit from it.
- rectang 6y ago
  > I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. I don't have a problem with the terms of their license. Use whatever license you want — just don't call it "open source"! From the blog post... This is problematic: > open-source in spirit It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses, which have a decades-long history and almost all of which do the same thing this license does: impose a field-of-use restriction to limit commercial competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software By corrupting the term "open source", they are leeching off of the goodwill created by the Open Source movement, and they shouldn't expect people to stop complaining about it until they stop.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    Hard disagree. The OSI may have "Open Source" in its name, but we decide what "open source" means. And I agree with the 'spirit' of open source, which is based in RMS' inability to replace code on his printer. The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications. This "it's not open-source unless you allow Amazon to profit from your charitable work" is horse hockey. I don't care if this is how a hardliner sees it. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and this is important enough that I support the migration of "open-source" to include these restrictions. Which, as they point out, affect none of the people using their code, and only the corporations (not people!) who would abuse the goodwill created by the Open Source movement.
    - boogies 6y ago
      What about the AGPL? Wouldn’t it grant “the right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications” and provide protection from FAANG profiting without reciprocating, while being OSI and FSF approved?
      - carlhjerpe 6y ago
        The problem with agpl is that no companies want to touch it. It's too restrictive if you ever want to integrate something with your internal proprietary moneymaking code.
- wyldfire 6y ago
  > Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it If you're calling your potential licensees leeches, you probably don't have Open Source in mind.
- Drdrdrq 6y ago
  There is just one tiny little thing missing - the license is not generic. I believe a big driver for success of FOSS licenses is that you don't need a lawyer to use them (either as a user or as developer). We are seeing quite a few businesses using these "Cloud Protection Licenses", but they would all benefit if they agreed on a single, well understood legal document (or at least only a few of them, all generic). I wonder if Commons Clause was just too early?
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago
  You can't distribute changes to the source code. This is a read-only license. That's both a practical limitation and a serious criticism of a company that markets itself as open source.
- mcherm 6y ago
  I just want to point out that if Postgres had a similar license then Timescale wouldn't be able to offer their product as a service.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. It's almost as if the, in practical terms, near-identical standards of the OSI and FSF weren't just picked haphazardly from the air, but actually reflect the result of a thorough and detailed consideration of what features are necessary to unlock the value that OSI pursues mainly from a pragmatic angle and FSF pursues mainly from an ideological angle, and that all the elements of that standard I react in a way that there is a crisp rather than smooth falloff in achieving the sought-after value when not all the criteria are met. > Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale Preventing competitive services is the same thing as protecting lock-in and rent extraction. Now, that is a central purpose of copyright and the traditional focus of proprietary licensing, so that’s not a novel focus of licensing at all. It is, however, directly opposed to the central purpose and value of F/OSS to end-users as well as downstream developers, both from a pragmatic/economic and ideological perspective. > That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses No, it's the central purpose and value of F/OSS licenses. It's a shortcoming from the perspective of prospective rentiers, sure, but that's not an incidental side effect unrelated to why F/OSS is sought by those who seek it; freedom from rentiers is the whole point.
nemothekid 6y ago
While this looks like the end of arbitrary enterprise tiers, when I look around to me it looks like the other database providers saw Snowflake execute "cloud" brilliantly, and now everyone is trying to emulate that. Turns out the need to keep your data on prem has been greatly exaggerated, and most companies would rather pay a single cloud bill than paying for more machines and FTEs to handle another product.
- znpy 6y ago
  I wouldn't look at it that way. A company running on premises probably has a mindset that is okay with dealing with all the things related. And it probably operates at a scale where it can save a lot by not moving to the cloud. This is often jut not understood by a lot of people. A company embracing the cloud doesn't want to do that and is just interested in services. They don't want hosts, they want service endpoints. There are a lot of developer-centric companies for which operations and operational work is definitely not a core of the business, and have no interest in getting operational work and know-how in house.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  > Turns out the need to keep your data on prem has been greatly exaggerated... It's more like selling on-prem is slower and can lead to a slower growth ramp. The change may reflect pressure to focus on growth to ensure payback on investment. If you execute like Snowflake it accelerates revenue growth significantly.
mosselman 6y ago
I am probably wrong, as often is the case, but I seem to remember that High availability used to be in the enterprise tier. Now it is missing from the “software tier”. What am I missing? Is HA now free or not?
- mfreed 6y ago
  TimescaleDB (single-node) leverages Postgres features for HA (physical replication). It was never in the "enterprise tier", it fully works with the pure Apache 2 version. We also make available k8s helm charts that make it super easy to setup replicated clusters, including with mechanisms (Patroni) for automated failure detection and failover, and continuous incremental backup. That's also available under the Apache-2 license: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-kubernetes https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-kubernetes (There used to be some slightly confusing language in our product page that perhaps led to some of your confusion, and apologies for that.) For multi-node (available starting in TimescaleDB 2.0), we are working on more native mechanisms for replication. But as announced earlier, these will all be "community" features (free) under our Timescale License.
  - jjjensen90 6y ago
    I've commented on it before, but I have to say again, the Timescale Helm charts are by far the best way I've ever seen a database run in Kubernetes, and actually from an operations, backup, and scaling perspective they are the best database management experience I've had period. Huge fan, always enjoy talking with Feike, and keep up the great work Timescale team.
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    Great job on the product! I was also very impressed with the support on slack channel, you guys rock! One thing that I found confusing is that there is no clear explanation of the differences between the editions. Your answers are very clear and explain things nicely, but I would expect this information to be available on your site. Just a thumbs up. Keep up the good work!
  - mosselman 6y ago
ttsda 6y ago
I've been following these guys since the project started, and it keeps getting better! Well done!
- nmaludy 6y ago
  Agreed! We run several instances in production and have had zero problems. TimescaleDB engineers, if you are watching / reading. Thank you VERY MUCH! You totally rock!
  - jason_slack 6y ago
    I'm using TimescaleDB for algo trading and it is performing beautifully. It's been rock solid and is handling everything being thrown at it (and in my case, it's every second of every day, yes weekends too). edit: I have about 24,000 tables most with millions of rows. All 24,000 tables are touched at least daily. Often every few seconds.
- mfreed 6y ago
  This is all great to hear, and the whole team really loves this type of feedback/support from the community. So thank YOU! (Feel free to also reach out to me at mike (at) timescale anytime, or mike in slack.timescale.com)
snarkypixel 6y ago
A bit of a side question, but how slow would it be if we were to query the data without using a time-based approach? I.e. "select * from obj where parent_id = <x>" --> Imagine we had billions of obj and a few thousands matching "parent_id" added randomly during the last 5-10 years. Would there be an index on "parent_id" or would it need to read every hypertable for such a query? Basically, I'm trying to understand if Timescale is /only/ useful for timeseries or if it has good-enough performance for other use-cases.
- mfreed 6y ago
  Internally, a hypertable "partitions" data into 1+ dimensions, typically always by time, but also by other dimensions (esp. for multi-node). Each of these partitions are called a "chunk" (and are actually Postgres tables within the DB). You can also define arbitrary indexes on a hypertable; practically, these index definitions get "pushed down" to all chunks, so an index is built on each chunk. Queries have two-stages: 1. Using "constraint exclusion" by looking at the SQL query and constaints on each chunk (e.g., their time interval), exclude certain chunks for the query. 2. "Push down" the query (often in parallel) to all non-excluded chunks, and collect/aggregate those results. Various features in TimescaleDB will help even in your case: 1. You get parallelism to scan across chunks. If employing multi-node (TimescaleDB 2.x), you can parallelize these aggregations across servers. 2. You can employ native columnar compression, which gets like 94-97% compression rates, and allows you to organize your data based on selected keys (the "segmentby" parameter). So if you "segmentby" parent_id, it really collocates that data together, and enables much faster query. Thanks for quesiton! https://docs.timescale.com/ https://docs.timescale.com/ https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/compression https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/compress... https://slack.timescale.com// https://slack.timescale.com//
  - yamrzou 6y ago
    Another side question, please. How does TimescaleDB compare to Clickhouse? Since you mentioned compression, I've been using Clickhouse to store bitemporal data, and have been amazed by its speed and compression levels. Unfortunately it's lacking in terms of relational modeling. Would I get the best of two worlds with TimescaleDB? What are the tradeoffs?
jordz 6y ago
Hey! Maybe mfreed could answer this but how does this affect users of Timescale as part of Azure's Managed Posgres service, is this something that will still continue to be available?
- k-rus 6y ago
  It is Apache version of TimescaleDB there (right?), which stays the same. While, those, who are using TimescaleDB under Timescale license, e.g., on premise, have now right to repair, for example.
- mfreed 6y ago
  Azure Postgres offers the Apache-2 Edition of TimescaleDB, not the Community Edition (which the TSL applies to). Same with DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Scaleways, Alibaba, etc. So they can continue to offer the Apache-2 Edition, but could not before, and still can't, offer the Community Edition. Community is where a lot of our more advanced features lie: multi-node, columnar compression, continuous and real-time aggregates, automation, advanced analytics, etc.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    fwiw, I've spent 10 minutes scouring the timescale.com but I can't find any information about the difference between the Apache-2 Edition or the Community edition. Links from your GitHub readme suggest that such information used to be there, but now it's all "cloud" vs "software" - if I choose "software", which of the two editions do I get? I assume this is still a WIP since the recent licensing / business model changes likely also warranted website changes, hence my feedback. Congrats on the move btw, and fantastic that Timescale Cloud is working so well as a business model. Are you considering adding other clouds? I ask for selfish reasons as we're currently on Digital Ocean and quite happily so. If Timescale Cloud would exist for DO we'd likely become a customer. In fact, if your business model succeeds and gets adopted by other open source vendors, supporting a wide range of clouds and hosting providers might very well help directly undermine the current effective oligopoly that is AWS/GCP/Azure! That'd be just splendid. Sorry for rambling a bit :-)
maltalex 6y ago
Is there a list of enterprise features which are now free?
- mfreed 6y ago
  Most of the enterprise features were moved actually moved into the Community tier in our 1.7 release, where we also announced that the upcoming multi-node would also be a Community feature: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-1-7-fast-continuous-aggregates-with-real-time-views-postgresql-12-support-and-more-community-features/ https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-1-7-fast-continu... (Many thought that multi-node would be an enterprise feature, as that's somewhat common for databases.) I believe that it was only data-tiering that was remaining/moved from enterprise to community as part of the 2.0 release. But the bigger thing is the "elimination" of the notion of enterprise / usage limits from the license and code base, as a statement for the future.
didip 6y ago
Going off tangent here, what would be a killer Timescale feature is to have multi-master writes.
tapirl 6y ago
Read it as Tailscale. ;D
- mfreed 6y ago
  You aren't only one =) https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/1301565453702107136 https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/1301565453702107136
Rebelgecko 6y ago
I'm developing a bit of a Pavlovian response to blog posts that begin with "An update to <Product>", so I was glad to see that all of the changes seem really positive. TimescaleDB is a neat piece of software and I'd definitely recommend checking it out if you're looking for a time series database. I had used some of their competitors in the past and it wasn't a fun experience. They had a high learning curve (things like multiple custom query languages, quasi-relational design that led to massive performance penalties if used the "wrong" way, etc), and at least for my use case the performance wasn't even good enough to justify the esotericism (although I've only used Timescale on small hobby projects with low data rates so maybe it's not fair to complain about another DB's performance with heavier workloads). IMO what makes Timescale so great and user friendly is that after you set up your tables you can treat it like a regular old SQL database. Everything just works, and you get all the niceties when you make temporal queries.
nwmcsween 6y ago
Does timescale have speed party with click house yet? IIRC there was some issues with plumbing postgres to do SIMD or something?
skrebbel 6y ago
> What we have preserved, however, is the main restriction preventing other companies from offering TimescaleDB-as-a-Service in the cloud. I wonder how this ties in to eg Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product. According to their docs[0] I can just `CREATE EXTENSION timescaledb` on a managed postgres instance and I'm done. Isn't that totally breaking the TSL? And if not, what's preventing AWS and friends from doing the same? [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/resources/supported-extensions/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/resou... EDIT: just saw that mfreed answered a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581533
- akulkarni 6y ago
  The version available in Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product is the Apache-2 edition of TimescaleDB. It doesn't included advanced capabilities like native compression, multi-node, continuous aggregations, etc.
shay_ker 6y ago
You gotta hand it to them - Mike & Ajay are fantastic at writing blog posts. Either it's all them, or they have someone helping them, but either way the content is really top-notch. Seems like table-stakes for anyone including the dev community when building databases these days.
- mfreed 6y ago
  Aww, thanks =) We are good co-editors for each other! We have a fun and long co-founder history, actually, going back >20 years. So lots of experience doing so!
- akulkarni 6y ago
  Aw yes, thank you :) We do write these posts (and as other folks at Timescale will attest, we are also notoriously picky editors for other peoples' posts) We've been writing together for a long-time. One of my favorite memories at MIT was working on a joint 6.033 paper with Mike 20 years ago (some of you will know what I'm talking about). Probably lost to the early Internet dustbin tho :) UPDATE: I found it! http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~mfreed/docs/6.033/smartcard.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~mfreed/docs/6.033/smartcard.pdf
  - mfreed 6y ago
    Oof. Making undergrad course project reports available for the world to see! ;) The third member of that team has also built some pretty cool technology -- maybe behind some of the music you're listening to right now: https://www.izotope.com/ https://www.izotope.com/
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
This move makes sense; I am trying to think about the implications of this specific license long term, and it seems it strikes a balance between protecting the company from AWS, Azure and GCP, while at the same time offering a relatively straightforward framework for their customers and, down the road, for 3rd party vendors. If they succeed, this could be the blueprint for many other companies in a similar situation. Keep up the good work!
sneak 6y ago
> These licenses attempt to maintain an open-source spirit No they’re not. Open source licenses are in the open source spirit. Source available licenses are not. Free software is free to use for any purpose. If your software comes with nonfree restrictions, it is not only not free software, it is not in the spirit of free software. This is just more anticompetitive behavior from those that mistakenly believe that IP is property to be guarded with the machinery of the state (and the associated threat of violence for transgressions) to back them up. Your software either is free to use for all purposes, or it is not. If it’s the latter, why the fake and misleading “in the spirit” posturing? Make a decision and be proud of it instead of pretending you’re something you’re not.
manigandham 6y ago
I wish more vendors would move this way. The rise of cloud computing has made it clear that people want to buy services, not software licenses. Too many (DB) vendors keep trying to sell licenses with a heavy sales process, and barely have a working cloud offering while complaining about AWS.
- mcfedr 6y ago
  This exactly! All the stuff from Redis, Elastic and others whilst they have terrible 'cloud' offerings, of course I'd rather use Aws, they make it really simple, reliable and don't charge too much, meanwhile none of these have terraform plugins and the price is insane.
mixedCase 6y ago
> Rights still disallowed under Timescale License [...] > No right to distribute modified Source > No right to distribute modified Binaries, unless as part of a Value Added Product Yeah given these restrictions the license doesn't even come close to the spirit of Open Source and it's laughable that they suggest otherwise. Of course, they're well within their rights to do this and I wish them the best of luck doing business with people who are willing to entertain the use of a proprietary database (a term I wish they would embrace for the sake of honesty), but personally I could never use or recommend TimescaleDB in good conscience.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Yeah, this is basically closed source software with source code available for viewing. Just because Microsoft allows the windows source code to be viewed by some institutions doesn't make windows open source. There's room for debate on open source vs. not open source thing but I don't see how this falls into the gray area. When you're not allowing forking and distributing modifications then I feel it falls squarely into not open source.
geofft 6y ago
As an aside, this article links to Wikipedia to insinuate that there's some ongoing problem with the OSI and it's likely to fade in importance. Wikipedia, in turn, mentions two recent problems. The first is that Bruce Perens left the OSI because they were considering approving a license that he thought wasn't open source - so this doesn't back up the idea that the OSI is too cautious with licenses and that the sentiment is shifting in the direction of accepting more licenses as "open source" than the OSI would want to. The second is that ESR got banned from the mailing lists. If you believe his version of the story, it was because he spoke up in favor of keeping the OSD intact. If you believe the OSI's version of the story, it was because of his behavior. Yes, this was technically controversial (ESR seems to be extraordinarily good at having controversy follow wherever he goes), but again, neither interpretation backs up the idea that people want the OSI to be more liberal about licensing. I think this Wikipedia section is all undue weight which could be justifiably removed, and I think it's weird that this post points to the (mutable) Wikipedia article to make its point.
- akulkarni 6y ago
  This is a totally fair comment. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I've removed the Wikipedia link and any mention of OSI "controversy". However, I do believe sentiment is shifting (as can be seen in these comments), so I left that part in. Thanks for helping us improve the post :)
orlandohill 6y ago
If anyone is interested in using a source-available license for their own code, the Polyform Project has a set of standardized, source-available licenses. https://polyformproject.org/ https://polyformproject.org/ PolyForm Shield would probably achieve the same result as the Timescale License. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/
- asim 6y ago
  I am using this quite successfully in Micro (https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro). Having spoken to one of the authors Heather Meeker, who wrote the majority of the custom licenses, I'm fairly confident it's going to become an industry standard. There is no point wasting time drafting custom licenses. Drop in Polyform Shield to defend against AWS and others in one simple move as you would have used MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses in the past.
- henryfjordan 6y ago
  The PolyForm Shield license prohibits competition with the original project, but then goes on to define "competition" > Goods and services compete even when provided free of charge If you host your project on Github under this license and I fork it, then my Github page is competing with yours and I am therefore in violation.
  - orlandohill 6y ago
    Please read the license terms carefully. Distribution of the source code, modified or unmodified, would not be considered competition. On the contrary, it is an explicitly granted right. So, for example, forking on GitHub is allowed. Distribution License The licensor grants you an additional copyright license to distribute copies of the software. Your license to distribute covers distributing the software with changes and new works permitted by Changes and New Works License.
    - henryfjordan 6y ago
      I did read it carefully, and provided thoughtful feedback. > Any purpose is a permitted purpose, except for providing any product that competes with the software or any product the licensor or any of its affiliates provides using the software. > Goods and services compete even when provided free of charge. If you market a product as a practical substitute for the software or another product, it definitely competes. If I use your software and find a bug, I am prohibited from hosting a fork with a fix for the bug on Github as it would clearly be a practical substitute for the original.
carlhjerpe 6y ago
Just curious, what does distributing sourcecode mean? If I fork on github and push a change, am I then distributing sourcecode?
- andrewshadura 6y ago
  Yes.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    That is quite weird, i guess they'd never go after people for doing this "the right way". But it's not nice being in breach of license without ill intent.
StavrosK 6y ago
Reading the comments here, it seems to me that there are two sides to the debate: One side says it's not FOSS unless it's completely free, and the other side says it's fine for a small subset of use cases to lose a modicum of freedom if it means that everyone else benefits with more software that's essentially OSS. I think that what the "purist" view is not considering so much is that, when it comes to a company like Timescale, the choice isn't between "OSI" and "source available", it's between "source available" and "closed source". They're a company that wants to make a profit from the software it spends resources to develop. The debate seems to be mostly on whether this license should be called "open source", but I think there's an implicit value judgement there, which I'd like to make explicit. I'd like to clarify that, given that it's almost impossible to make money when AWS can just take your OSS product and undercut you, Timescale is doing us all a great service by giving us a product for free and making the source available. However, does it really make sense to argue over the license is OSS or not? The FOSS ecosystem has a monetization problem, and it's largely being funded by our collective donation of our time. I think that having options that allow us to grow the ecosystem in a sustainable way is important, even if they aren't as pure as we'd all like. Practicality usually beats purity, and "source available" is better than "closed source". I haven't really seen any concrete dangers that come from a "source available" license, especially any that make it worse than just having no source (which is the real alternative here), so if anyone could educate me, I would be grateful.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Language matters and distinctions matter and branding matters. If you believe that OSS > Source Available > Closed Source that doesn't mean you want the concept of OSS to be diluted by Source Available. If you want to release a Source Available piece of code then all the power to you. But don't call it Open Source Software (or whatever vague variant of that implication you use) unless it actually is. Source Available should stand or fall on it's own merits and not by trying to co-opt the goodwill that OSS has built up over the last many decades. edit: This is a license that doesn't allow source code modifications to be released and only after feedback does it even allow you to run source code modifications privately. That very much is not in the "spirit of open source."
doctor_eval 6y ago
I’m not much of a fan of AWS, but when Amazon takes a “free as in speech AND beer” product and turns it into SaaS, that’s pretty much the expected outcome since (a) the license allows it and (b) companies exist to make money. Why would Amazon spend more than necessary to create this service? It’s not that they’re intrinsically evil for doing this; it’s literally how the rules are written. If you want to change that world, you need to change the rules. So I think this direction for complex, expensive to create “open” backend software is inevitable, and that dogmatic appeals to some formal and restrictive definition of openness are philosophically naive. Arguments that Timescale is not open remind me again of the paradox of tolerance [0]. This basically says that a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance. This is because a tolerant society is vulnerable to intolerance; a tolerant society, by definition, fails when it allows intolerance. Similarly, I am quite comfortable to consider software “open” if I can download it, build it, and use it in my products; even if it is closed in some specific dimension that is required for it to exist. It’s a shame in theory that I can’t create a little TSaaS without Timescale’s approval, but it’s not a right that most people care about, and I prefer that to a world in which the Timescale product itself doesn’t exist. Ultimately, it’s an argument between dogmatic openness and pragmatic openness. I’m decidedly in the pragmatic camp on this one. And FWIW, my recollection is that OSI itself was created in order to extend and formalise the definition of “open” to include pragmatically open licenses beyond the GPL. (I could be wrong here, it was a long time ago and I was not involved, but I seem to remember discussions on slashdot and technocrat) In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance edited to clarify.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  > In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want. Thank you for putting this so succinctly.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
> Rights previously granted (and still allowed) under Timescale License > Right to run unmodified TimescaleDB for internal use > Right to utilize unmodified TimescaleDB to offer a Value Added Service > Right to distribute unmodified Source and Binaries as part of Value Added Product > Right to modify TimescaleDB for internal development and testing, and subsequently upstream modifications to Timescale Do you can still run modified (or unmodified) "community edition" timescale in an SaaS configuration right? Also it sounds like you can actually run unmodified TimeScaleDB (Timescale license w/ all the enterprise features) as long as you add some value (is easy setup value? Do I need to like automatically shard or something on top of it?)... Am I misunderstanding? I'd love to run a postgres aaS provider for fun someday and I'd like to use timescale as one of the supported addons.
andrewshadura 6y ago
Calling your users leeches while being leeches yourselves, how ironic.
nottorp 6y ago
I wonder if the Star Wars clip in the blog post is licensed :)
kdtsh 6y ago
I've been thinking very hard about introducing Timescale as a replacement for Cassandra in an application which is starting to show its age (when it was first built in the early 2010s, Cassandra was the only player in the game - but Cassandra never was a great time-series database). One thing which has made me wary of Timescale is the source-available license - which is great and all, but if the license changes significantly to make it more restrictive then we end up in a tough spot. A constant sticking point of Cassandra is that it's Apache Cassandra - it's very unlikely the license is ever going to become more restrictive, since it's owned by the ASF. This looks like a great development though, and I'm warming even more to further exploring Timescale. Something I'm still trying to understand: does not allowing database-as-a-service just mean that you can't have, say, an application which abstracts away the details of implementing a Timescale database (e.g. you input some kind of configuration file which describes the details of your deployment) without violating the TSL? Are you still allowed to leverage Timescale in your SaaS?
- drpebcak 6y ago
  The distinction they try to make is whether or not timescale is a ‘value added’ thing or not. You can’t provide a customer with a hosted timescaledb for them to use as the service, but you can provide a dashboard that stores data in timescale.

427 points by bithavoc 6y ago

It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it. That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses that really should be addressed. Until then I expect this kind of almost-FOSS license to become more popular in the future. We're seeing it from many of the recently founded open-source companies in the cloud era.

aloknnikhil 6y ago
And not to mention profiting off of the patches and fixes the maintainers provide and almost never contributing back. I am definitely happy to see attempts to help the creators.
nautilus12 6y ago
Its kind of tricky, in terms of the license how do you end up with that practical limitation? IE how do you distinguish a company thats "too big" (like amazon) to be likely to just be predatorially taking advantage of OSS, vs others.
- eloff 6y ago
  Many new open source companies, like Timescale, Cockroach Labs are going with a managed cloud service offering as their business model. Even RethinkDB pivoted in that direction, although too late in the game for them to survive. So one could make an open-source license specifically reserving that freedom for the creators only. There are probably other business models one could try to protect. The basic idea I think is give as much freedom as possible while also providing some protection for specific use cases that allow the creators to be compensated for their work. It benefits nobody if you create a wild west of freedoms that deny creators a way to finance their work.
- mfreed 6y ago
  Thanks for question. One of the things that Timescale License does (similar with Elastic, Confluent Community, etc.) is to define a "Value Added Service", and basically say you can utilize/distribute the database as part of a SaaS service or product provided that it's a Value Added Service/Product, and basically just isn't offering the (in our case) "TimescaleDB-as-a-Service". Then it becomes a bit of reading the actual definition in the license. In our case: https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-added-products-or-services https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-... Unlike the other licenses, we tried to couch part of this definition is specific details that engineers could understand, e.g. "(iii) users of such Value Added Products or Services are prohibited, either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database objects, such as through use of the Timescale Data Definition Interfaces, in a Timescale Database utilized by such Value Added Products or Services." So basically one important test would be: if your SaaS service is defining the data schema, indexes, etc., all good. If your users have arbitrary DDL access to the database and do this all themselves, that would "classify" as a "database-as-a-service" offering under this definition.
gigatexal 6y ago
Hopefully the CockroachDB folks are reading this too. The features set behind the enterprise only license seem arbitrary
- foobiekr 6y ago
  These are never arbitrary. They are almost always the result of a lot of internal discussions the outcome of which no one is really happy with.
- sandstrom 6y ago
  Agree, they don't even have backups in the non-enterprise license.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    They don’t have incremental backups. You are of course able to dump the tables, and it’s fully compatible with postgresql export utilities.
sytse 6y ago
This is certainly a great improvement in the license! Kudos to TimescaleDB. I wonder if the new license allows us to offer services on top of TimescaleDB in a multi-tenant setting. GitLab.com has metric monitoring https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ and we're considering using TimescaleDB to store these. We would not offer direct access to the database. The relevant section in the license https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses seems to be the prohibition to "provide any form of software-as-a-service or service offering in which the TSL Licensed Software is offered or made available to third parties to provide time-series database functions or operations, other than as part of Your Value Added Products or Services". I'm not sure if metrics count as time-series database functions or operations.
- mfreed 6y ago
  I posted below, but an important check really is the definition of the "Value Added Product or Service". https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-added-products-or-services https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-... On its face, it sounds like your use case is totally allowed under the TSL (and in fact, since the TSL was initially launched in Dec 2018). We have plenty of users who build commercially-available monitoring products/services on top of TimescaleDB. Happy to help if you'd like - our engineers are always available in our Slack Channel: https://slack.timescale.com/ https://slack.timescale.com/ UPDATED: Ha! I didn't realize I was responding to the CEO of GitLab. =)
  - cbaleanu 6y ago
    And that is why HN is my favorite part of the net for about a decade now :)
  - sytse 6y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, glad to hear it is allowed.
    - camkego 6y ago
GordonS 6y ago
Yep, they even quoted some recent HN comments in the article. I have absolutely no doubt that a small but vocal minority will remain unsatisfied. I'm not surprised by this move, as there was barely anything left in the Enterprise license anyway. Personally, I think this is a great move, and one that should in theory leave that vocal minority with very little to actually grumble about.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  I likely qualify as "vocal minority". These changes make TimescaleDB something I could entertain using. My concerns related to the "right-to-repair" / "right-to-improve", and with vendor lock-in. These changes address my concerns handily.
Netcob 6y ago
Maybe that's just the natural progression for technologies that are dependencies of other technologies. As a software business you don't want to depend on too many pieces of software (or hardware) that you have little to no control over. Linux is the best example of a solution for that problem - even the tech giants won't bother making their own OS anymore if there is already one out there that they can use and modify. And ISAs (RISC-V) will probably follow that route too. What's interesting though is that businesses seem to be unable to initiate that progress on their own. You need those vocal FOSS people for that, who will tirelessly drag technology towards an ideal we'll never reach... but nobody else will get the ball rolling. FOSS as the basis for entire ecosystems of businesses that would have never existed without it makes total sense, but no business will create it out of thin air. I think this gradual opening up like with TimescaleDB is simply an effect of the wind blowing in that direction. Few will be going full speed, but nobody wants to be left behind.
est31 6y ago
> No right to distribute modified Source Still seems like a serious issue to me.
- rbjorklin 6y ago
  How so? To me it seems like a clause like it is required to protect their business from the "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" scenario.
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    I mean... that's fine if that's what their business requires. It just isn't open source. It's "source available" or "shared source" or something. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as everybody is up-front about what it is. Edit: to qualify what I just said... I obviously only mean that IF their license doesn't also allow distribution of patch files. You can be OSI compliant and not allow distribution of the modified source as a "whole" so long as you allow distribution of the patches needed to get to the modified source. I didn't notice at a brief glance where the "new" (or old) Timescale license falls on this point.
    - est31 6y ago
      Yeah it's perfectly fine that they make a product under this license, as going full closed source would be perfectly fine as well. But it's not open source.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Yes, it is necessary to prevent the core purpose of open source. Which is fine, proprietary licenses are a valid option. Just don’t pretend it's almost open source. It's a source-available proprietary license designed to prevent the kind of exclusionary rent-extraction whose absence is central to the value proposition of open source.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it. That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses that really should be addressed Then use AGPL?
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  How does AGPL address this?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    The original problem was Amazon "leeching off their software without paying for it". If Amazon shares their changes (as the AGPL requires), then they're contributing, not leeching. If the problem is just that Amazon happens to use a product, or horror of horrors, offer a hosted version... I dunno, I just can't see what the issue is. Is every developer upset about people profiting off their work sending a monthly check to Linus Torvalds for using Linux, Apple for clang and/or GNU for gcc, and the maintainers of their distro of choice? Or is only their software that nobody else is allowed to make money off of?
    - ivalm 6y ago
      Timescaledb the company wants to make money from their managed service, thus they are protecting it from competition. That’s fine. They are not true open source but that’s fine too.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Agreed. I don't mind companies selling proprietary software. I do mind companies trying to claim that they're offering open source software when they're actually offering source-available software. With the Apache2 version, Timescale actually appears to be doing both, but I can't find a description of the differences so I can't comment very well; I assume they're doing open core. Which, again, is fine as long as you don't try and pretend that you're doing something else.
geofft 6y ago
I've been vocal in the past about using an OSI-approved license for one very specific practical reason: it gets you the ability to be packaged for Linux distros etc. that have policies that match the OSI definition (usually by having terms that match the OSI's current definition, not by delegating the decision to the OSI). In my opinion, that's important for adoption - not as important as it used to be in years past, yes, but still important. Even if production users are going to want to run the latest version (or run a commercially-supported binary), the ability to apt-get install something on your laptop to test it has value, as does the ability for other pieces of software in a Linux distro to depend on it. That said, given that they're following a more-or-less "open core" model where there's a clearly FOSS portion (Apache 2) and some non-FOSS extra features on top, I don't think that this is going to be a practical barrier. It looks like the Apache 2 portion of Timescale is substantial enough that you can package it in Linux distros and use it. So in this particular case, I think it doesn't matter whether the rest of it is technically "open source" - it very clearly isn't going to be accepted by Linux distros, and it very clearly is fine for its intended users, and both of those are okay.
- akx 6y ago
  With the release cadence of the current major distros vs the pace at which software is released, it doesn't seem to be worth it to get your stuff in the official repos, to quickly be several major versions behind. You can package debs or rpms for easy install, host them on a server (or set up an apt/rpm repo) just fine even if they're not FOSS.
mindcrime 6y ago
I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. I don't have a dog in this fight, so to speak, as I'm not a user of Timescale. All I'll say is that I hate to see license proliferation in general, and I don't think people should refer to things as "Open Source" if they aren't using an OSI compliant license. To me, if I see a project that's using anything other than a well known, well understood, OSI sanctioned license, I get the heebie-jeebies - because I don't know what the license permits. And I don't want to invest time trying to understand the nuances and ins-and-outs of every random project specific license that comes along. So props to Timescale for making what appear to be improvements to their license. But I'll always advocate using an off-the-shelf license when/where possible. shrug
- fastball 6y ago
  > because I don't know what the license permits That's why you read it...
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    Yes, and then, if I'm smart, spend time and money discussing it with attorneys and/or other experts, who will probably tell me that they don't know either, because there is no body of case law concerning this new and unique "special snowflake" of a license..., etc, etc. Of course I could just "wing it", read through it, and work off my layman's interpretation and hope for the best. Or.. I could choose to stick to well understood and well known licenses that already exist.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      I agree in general that reading licenses as a lay person can be problematic. In this case though, TimescaleDB has blog posts that describe the license in very plain language, and provide clear examples of what you can and can't do - you can basically do anything except provide it as a service. No need to "wing it".
      - 6y ago
hodgesrm 6y ago
> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Don't forget that Timescale can alter the terms of their license at any time. That's the material difference from an OSI-approved license. Here's the relevant term of the TSL Agreement. Emphasis mine: > (c) Distribution of Source Code or Binaries in Standalone Form. Subject to the prohibitions in Section 2.2 below, a license to copy and distribute the Timescale Software source code and binaries solely in unmodified standalone form and subject to the terms and conditions of the most current version of this TSL Agreement.
- akulkarni 6y ago
  Not really. Modifications only apply to next versions, doesn't change to prior versions: The modified agreement shall govern any new version of the TSL Licensed Software (and all its constituent source code and binaries) that is officially released as a complete version release by Timescale on or after such Posted Date. https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-7-2-modification https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-7-2-modific...
  - hodgesrm 6y ago
    Thanks, I was looking for that and could not find it. The point remains that there's nothing to protect users from changes in licenses like the TSL. It's possible with FOSS licenses provided you own all copyrights but much less likely.
ramses0 6y ago
https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#The_guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline... The litmus test has always been: "while you may not want your software used in a weapon of mass destruction (or other purpose you don't agree with), it is not free software / open source unless it can be used for that purpose" ... those are items #5 and #6 in the DFSG guidelines. While Mr. Torvalds may have been a much richer man if he prohibited "Linux as a Service", it was the unrestricted freedom given by the GPL which allowed companies like Amazon/AWS to use Linux in the first place.
- igneo676 6y ago
  This. It boils down to "words mean things". They're fine being firmly on the side of proprietary-with-some-preservation-of-rights; it is _their_ code after all. Their customers get to decide what level of rights they're happy with putting up with. They're not Open Source. They're not Free Software. Being part of those communities requires following the norms of those communities.
  - ramses0 6y ago
    (people forget how radical `Copyleft` was at the time of its inception!)
  - mfreed 6y ago
    Appreciate the sentiment. We try pretty hard to be careful to not describe the Timescale Licensed code as Open Source, and typically refer to it as "source available". Of course, a big portion of our code is licensed under Apache 2, which clearly does qualify. From the Timescale License, for example: https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-0-background https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-0-backgroun... Thanks!
    - igneo676 6y ago
ensignavenger 6y ago
The new Timescale License doesn't only restrict AWS, it restricts anyone not Timescale from offering management services for the Timescale Licensed code. It restricts customers who find that Timescale is unable or unwilling to support them in an agree-able manner from paying some one else to manage it for them. All that is fine and dandy- it is clear that Timescale is open-core, with an Apache-licensed core and proprietary components, just like gitlab and other products. (Timescale is a bit more generous with their proprietary code, though, so that's nice). I will stick with strongly favoring building on open source code, myself, despite this generous offer of no-fee license to use their proprietary software.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  > It restricts customers who find that Timescale is unable or unwilling to support them in an agree-able manner from paying some one else to manage it for them. It restricts Customers from going to a Timescale-as-a-Service provider, but I don't see how it restricts the Customer from contracting to have a third-party support the Customer's Timescale installation (or to make changes to the codebase as a work-for-hire). I agree w/ your assessment of their new license insofar as it being proprietary. Their old proprietary license made the product unacceptable for my use, but I am comfortable with the limitations to my rights with the new proprietary license. It has enough "right-to-repair" and ability to avoid vendor lock-in to make me feel comfortable that I could maintain a private fork of my use case was dependent on their software. Edit: My first paragraph was a quick-and-dirty. The child post is absolutely right. The license restricts Customers from providing Timescale-as-a-Service services.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    As I understand it, it doesn’t restrict customers from going to a TSAAS provider, it simply means that if you want to provide TSAAS then you need to negotiate a different license from Timescale. The only restriction is that you can’t (necessarily) provide TSAAS for free. To me that’s free as in speech but not free as in beer, and is well within my personal understanding of “free software”. As the saying goes, the right to speech doesn’t imply the right to be heard; likewise, the right to inspect and modify software doesn’t necessarily imply the right to profit from it.
rectang 6y ago
> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. I don't have a problem with the terms of their license. Use whatever license you want — just don't call it "open source"! From the blog post... This is problematic: > open-source in spirit It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses, which have a decades-long history and almost all of which do the same thing this license does: impose a field-of-use restriction to limit commercial competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software By corrupting the term "open source", they are leeching off of the goodwill created by the Open Source movement, and they shouldn't expect people to stop complaining about it until they stop.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Hard disagree. The OSI may have "Open Source" in its name, but we decide what "open source" means. And I agree with the 'spirit' of open source, which is based in RMS' inability to replace code on his printer. The right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications. This "it's not open-source unless you allow Amazon to profit from your charitable work" is horse hockey. I don't care if this is how a hardliner sees it. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and this is important enough that I support the migration of "open-source" to include these restrictions. Which, as they point out, affect none of the people using their code, and only the corporations (not people!) who would abuse the goodwill created by the Open Source movement.
  - boogies 6y ago
    What about the AGPL? Wouldn’t it grant “the right to study the code running on your hardware, the right to make modifications to it, the right to distribute those modifications” and provide protection from FAANG profiting without reciprocating, while being OSI and FSF approved?
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      The problem with agpl is that no companies want to touch it. It's too restrictive if you ever want to integrate something with your internal proprietary moneymaking code.
wyldfire 6y ago
> Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it If you're calling your potential licensees leeches, you probably don't have Open Source in mind.
Drdrdrq 6y ago
There is just one tiny little thing missing - the license is not generic. I believe a big driver for success of FOSS licenses is that you don't need a lawyer to use them (either as a user or as developer). We are seeing quite a few businesses using these "Cloud Protection Licenses", but they would all benefit if they agreed on a single, well understood legal document (or at least only a few of them, all generic). I wonder if Commons Clause was just too early?
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
You can't distribute changes to the source code. This is a read-only license. That's both a practical limitation and a serious criticism of a company that markets itself as open source.
mcherm 6y ago
I just want to point out that if Postgres had a similar license then Timescale wouldn't be able to offer their product as a service.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. It's almost as if the, in practical terms, near-identical standards of the OSI and FSF weren't just picked haphazardly from the air, but actually reflect the result of a thorough and detailed consideration of what features are necessary to unlock the value that OSI pursues mainly from a pragmatic angle and FSF pursues mainly from an ideological angle, and that all the elements of that standard I react in a way that there is a crisp rather than smooth falloff in achieving the sought-after value when not all the criteria are met. > Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale Preventing competitive services is the same thing as protecting lock-in and rent extraction. Now, that is a central purpose of copyright and the traditional focus of proprietary licensing, so that’s not a novel focus of licensing at all. It is, however, directly opposed to the central purpose and value of F/OSS to end-users as well as downstream developers, both from a pragmatic/economic and ideological perspective. > That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses No, it's the central purpose and value of F/OSS licenses. It's a shortcoming from the perspective of prospective rentiers, sure, but that's not an incidental side effect unrelated to why F/OSS is sought by those who seek it; freedom from rentiers is the whole point.

nemothekid 6y ago

While this looks like the end of arbitrary enterprise tiers, when I look around to me it looks like the other database providers saw Snowflake execute "cloud" brilliantly, and now everyone is trying to emulate that. Turns out the need to keep your data on prem has been greatly exaggerated, and most companies would rather pay a single cloud bill than paying for more machines and FTEs to handle another product.

znpy 6y ago
I wouldn't look at it that way. A company running on premises probably has a mindset that is okay with dealing with all the things related. And it probably operates at a scale where it can save a lot by not moving to the cloud. This is often jut not understood by a lot of people. A company embracing the cloud doesn't want to do that and is just interested in services. They don't want hosts, they want service endpoints. There are a lot of developer-centric companies for which operations and operational work is definitely not a core of the business, and have no interest in getting operational work and know-how in house.
hodgesrm 6y ago
> Turns out the need to keep your data on prem has been greatly exaggerated... It's more like selling on-prem is slower and can lead to a slower growth ramp. The change may reflect pressure to focus on growth to ensure payback on investment. If you execute like Snowflake it accelerates revenue growth significantly.

mosselman 6y ago

I am probably wrong, as often is the case, but I seem to remember that High availability used to be in the enterprise tier. Now it is missing from the “software tier”. What am I missing? Is HA now free or not?

mfreed 6y ago
TimescaleDB (single-node) leverages Postgres features for HA (physical replication). It was never in the "enterprise tier", it fully works with the pure Apache 2 version. We also make available k8s helm charts that make it super easy to setup replicated clusters, including with mechanisms (Patroni) for automated failure detection and failover, and continuous incremental backup. That's also available under the Apache-2 license: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-kubernetes https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-kubernetes (There used to be some slightly confusing language in our product page that perhaps led to some of your confusion, and apologies for that.) For multi-node (available starting in TimescaleDB 2.0), we are working on more native mechanisms for replication. But as announced earlier, these will all be "community" features (free) under our Timescale License.
- jjjensen90 6y ago
  I've commented on it before, but I have to say again, the Timescale Helm charts are by far the best way I've ever seen a database run in Kubernetes, and actually from an operations, backup, and scaling perspective they are the best database management experience I've had period. Huge fan, always enjoy talking with Feike, and keep up the great work Timescale team.
- Drdrdrq 6y ago
  Great job on the product! I was also very impressed with the support on slack channel, you guys rock! One thing that I found confusing is that there is no clear explanation of the differences between the editions. Your answers are very clear and explain things nicely, but I would expect this information to be available on your site. Just a thumbs up. Keep up the good work!
- mosselman 6y ago

ttsda 6y ago

I've been following these guys since the project started, and it keeps getting better! Well done!

nmaludy 6y ago
Agreed! We run several instances in production and have had zero problems. TimescaleDB engineers, if you are watching / reading. Thank you VERY MUCH! You totally rock!
- jason_slack 6y ago
  I'm using TimescaleDB for algo trading and it is performing beautifully. It's been rock solid and is handling everything being thrown at it (and in my case, it's every second of every day, yes weekends too). edit: I have about 24,000 tables most with millions of rows. All 24,000 tables are touched at least daily. Often every few seconds.
mfreed 6y ago
This is all great to hear, and the whole team really loves this type of feedback/support from the community. So thank YOU! (Feel free to also reach out to me at mike (at) timescale anytime, or mike in slack.timescale.com)

snarkypixel 6y ago

A bit of a side question, but how slow would it be if we were to query the data without using a time-based approach? I.e. "select * from obj where parent_id = <x>" --> Imagine we had billions of obj and a few thousands matching "parent_id" added randomly during the last 5-10 years. Would there be an index on "parent_id" or would it need to read every hypertable for such a query? Basically, I'm trying to understand if Timescale is /only/ useful for timeseries or if it has good-enough performance for other use-cases.

mfreed 6y ago
Internally, a hypertable "partitions" data into 1+ dimensions, typically always by time, but also by other dimensions (esp. for multi-node). Each of these partitions are called a "chunk" (and are actually Postgres tables within the DB). You can also define arbitrary indexes on a hypertable; practically, these index definitions get "pushed down" to all chunks, so an index is built on each chunk. Queries have two-stages: 1. Using "constraint exclusion" by looking at the SQL query and constaints on each chunk (e.g., their time interval), exclude certain chunks for the query. 2. "Push down" the query (often in parallel) to all non-excluded chunks, and collect/aggregate those results. Various features in TimescaleDB will help even in your case: 1. You get parallelism to scan across chunks. If employing multi-node (TimescaleDB 2.x), you can parallelize these aggregations across servers. 2. You can employ native columnar compression, which gets like 94-97% compression rates, and allows you to organize your data based on selected keys (the "segmentby" parameter). So if you "segmentby" parent_id, it really collocates that data together, and enables much faster query. Thanks for quesiton! https://docs.timescale.com/ https://docs.timescale.com/ https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/compression https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/compress... https://slack.timescale.com// https://slack.timescale.com//
- yamrzou 6y ago
  Another side question, please. How does TimescaleDB compare to Clickhouse? Since you mentioned compression, I've been using Clickhouse to store bitemporal data, and have been amazed by its speed and compression levels. Unfortunately it's lacking in terms of relational modeling. Would I get the best of two worlds with TimescaleDB? What are the tradeoffs?

jordz 6y ago

Hey! Maybe mfreed could answer this but how does this affect users of Timescale as part of Azure's Managed Posgres service, is this something that will still continue to be available?

k-rus 6y ago
It is Apache version of TimescaleDB there (right?), which stays the same. While, those, who are using TimescaleDB under Timescale license, e.g., on premise, have now right to repair, for example.
mfreed 6y ago
Azure Postgres offers the Apache-2 Edition of TimescaleDB, not the Community Edition (which the TSL applies to). Same with DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Scaleways, Alibaba, etc. So they can continue to offer the Apache-2 Edition, but could not before, and still can't, offer the Community Edition. Community is where a lot of our more advanced features lie: multi-node, columnar compression, continuous and real-time aggregates, automation, advanced analytics, etc.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  fwiw, I've spent 10 minutes scouring the timescale.com but I can't find any information about the difference between the Apache-2 Edition or the Community edition. Links from your GitHub readme suggest that such information used to be there, but now it's all "cloud" vs "software" - if I choose "software", which of the two editions do I get? I assume this is still a WIP since the recent licensing / business model changes likely also warranted website changes, hence my feedback. Congrats on the move btw, and fantastic that Timescale Cloud is working so well as a business model. Are you considering adding other clouds? I ask for selfish reasons as we're currently on Digital Ocean and quite happily so. If Timescale Cloud would exist for DO we'd likely become a customer. In fact, if your business model succeeds and gets adopted by other open source vendors, supporting a wide range of clouds and hosting providers might very well help directly undermine the current effective oligopoly that is AWS/GCP/Azure! That'd be just splendid. Sorry for rambling a bit :-)

maltalex 6y ago

Is there a list of enterprise features which are now free?

mfreed 6y ago
Most of the enterprise features were moved actually moved into the Community tier in our 1.7 release, where we also announced that the upcoming multi-node would also be a Community feature: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-1-7-fast-continuous-aggregates-with-real-time-views-postgresql-12-support-and-more-community-features/ https://blog.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-1-7-fast-continu... (Many thought that multi-node would be an enterprise feature, as that's somewhat common for databases.) I believe that it was only data-tiering that was remaining/moved from enterprise to community as part of the 2.0 release. But the bigger thing is the "elimination" of the notion of enterprise / usage limits from the license and code base, as a statement for the future.

didip 6y ago

Going off tangent here, what would be a killer Timescale feature is to have multi-master writes.

tapirl 6y ago

Read it as Tailscale. ;D

mfreed 6y ago
You aren't only one =) https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/1301565453702107136 https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/1301565453702107136

Rebelgecko 6y ago

I'm developing a bit of a Pavlovian response to blog posts that begin with "An update to <Product>", so I was glad to see that all of the changes seem really positive. TimescaleDB is a neat piece of software and I'd definitely recommend checking it out if you're looking for a time series database. I had used some of their competitors in the past and it wasn't a fun experience. They had a high learning curve (things like multiple custom query languages, quasi-relational design that led to massive performance penalties if used the "wrong" way, etc), and at least for my use case the performance wasn't even good enough to justify the esotericism (although I've only used Timescale on small hobby projects with low data rates so maybe it's not fair to complain about another DB's performance with heavier workloads). IMO what makes Timescale so great and user friendly is that after you set up your tables you can treat it like a regular old SQL database. Everything just works, and you get all the niceties when you make temporal queries.

nwmcsween 6y ago

Does timescale have speed party with click house yet? IIRC there was some issues with plumbing postgres to do SIMD or something?

skrebbel 6y ago

> What we have preserved, however, is the main restriction preventing other companies from offering TimescaleDB-as-a-Service in the cloud. I wonder how this ties in to eg Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product. According to their docs[0] I can just `CREATE EXTENSION timescaledb` on a managed postgres instance and I'm done. Isn't that totally breaking the TSL? And if not, what's preventing AWS and friends from doing the same? [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/resources/supported-extensions/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/resou... EDIT: just saw that mfreed answered a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581533

akulkarni 6y ago
The version available in Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product is the Apache-2 edition of TimescaleDB. It doesn't included advanced capabilities like native compression, multi-node, continuous aggregations, etc.

shay_ker 6y ago

You gotta hand it to them - Mike & Ajay are fantastic at writing blog posts. Either it's all them, or they have someone helping them, but either way the content is really top-notch. Seems like table-stakes for anyone including the dev community when building databases these days.

mfreed 6y ago
Aww, thanks =) We are good co-editors for each other! We have a fun and long co-founder history, actually, going back >20 years. So lots of experience doing so!
akulkarni 6y ago
Aw yes, thank you :) We do write these posts (and as other folks at Timescale will attest, we are also notoriously picky editors for other peoples' posts) We've been writing together for a long-time. One of my favorite memories at MIT was working on a joint 6.033 paper with Mike 20 years ago (some of you will know what I'm talking about). Probably lost to the early Internet dustbin tho :) UPDATE: I found it! http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~mfreed/docs/6.033/smartcard.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~mfreed/docs/6.033/smartcard.pdf
- mfreed 6y ago
  Oof. Making undergrad course project reports available for the world to see! ;) The third member of that team has also built some pretty cool technology -- maybe behind some of the music you're listening to right now: https://www.izotope.com/ https://www.izotope.com/

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

This move makes sense; I am trying to think about the implications of this specific license long term, and it seems it strikes a balance between protecting the company from AWS, Azure and GCP, while at the same time offering a relatively straightforward framework for their customers and, down the road, for 3rd party vendors. If they succeed, this could be the blueprint for many other companies in a similar situation. Keep up the good work!

sneak 6y ago

> These licenses attempt to maintain an open-source spirit No they’re not. Open source licenses are in the open source spirit. Source available licenses are not. Free software is free to use for any purpose. If your software comes with nonfree restrictions, it is not only not free software, it is not in the spirit of free software. This is just more anticompetitive behavior from those that mistakenly believe that IP is property to be guarded with the machinery of the state (and the associated threat of violence for transgressions) to back them up. Your software either is free to use for all purposes, or it is not. If it’s the latter, why the fake and misleading “in the spirit” posturing? Make a decision and be proud of it instead of pretending you’re something you’re not.

manigandham 6y ago

I wish more vendors would move this way. The rise of cloud computing has made it clear that people want to buy services, not software licenses. Too many (DB) vendors keep trying to sell licenses with a heavy sales process, and barely have a working cloud offering while complaining about AWS.

mcfedr 6y ago
This exactly! All the stuff from Redis, Elastic and others whilst they have terrible 'cloud' offerings, of course I'd rather use Aws, they make it really simple, reliable and don't charge too much, meanwhile none of these have terraform plugins and the price is insane.

mixedCase 6y ago

> Rights still disallowed under Timescale License [...] > No right to distribute modified Source > No right to distribute modified Binaries, unless as part of a Value Added Product Yeah given these restrictions the license doesn't even come close to the spirit of Open Source and it's laughable that they suggest otherwise. Of course, they're well within their rights to do this and I wish them the best of luck doing business with people who are willing to entertain the use of a proprietary database (a term I wish they would embrace for the sake of honesty), but personally I could never use or recommend TimescaleDB in good conscience.

marcinzm 6y ago
Yeah, this is basically closed source software with source code available for viewing. Just because Microsoft allows the windows source code to be viewed by some institutions doesn't make windows open source. There's room for debate on open source vs. not open source thing but I don't see how this falls into the gray area. When you're not allowing forking and distributing modifications then I feel it falls squarely into not open source.

geofft 6y ago

As an aside, this article links to Wikipedia to insinuate that there's some ongoing problem with the OSI and it's likely to fade in importance. Wikipedia, in turn, mentions two recent problems. The first is that Bruce Perens left the OSI because they were considering approving a license that he thought wasn't open source - so this doesn't back up the idea that the OSI is too cautious with licenses and that the sentiment is shifting in the direction of accepting more licenses as "open source" than the OSI would want to. The second is that ESR got banned from the mailing lists. If you believe his version of the story, it was because he spoke up in favor of keeping the OSD intact. If you believe the OSI's version of the story, it was because of his behavior. Yes, this was technically controversial (ESR seems to be extraordinarily good at having controversy follow wherever he goes), but again, neither interpretation backs up the idea that people want the OSI to be more liberal about licensing. I think this Wikipedia section is all undue weight which could be justifiably removed, and I think it's weird that this post points to the (mutable) Wikipedia article to make its point.

akulkarni 6y ago
This is a totally fair comment. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I've removed the Wikipedia link and any mention of OSI "controversy". However, I do believe sentiment is shifting (as can be seen in these comments), so I left that part in. Thanks for helping us improve the post :)

orlandohill 6y ago

If anyone is interested in using a source-available license for their own code, the Polyform Project has a set of standardized, source-available licenses. https://polyformproject.org/ https://polyformproject.org/ PolyForm Shield would probably achieve the same result as the Timescale License. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/

asim 6y ago
I am using this quite successfully in Micro (https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro). Having spoken to one of the authors Heather Meeker, who wrote the majority of the custom licenses, I'm fairly confident it's going to become an industry standard. There is no point wasting time drafting custom licenses. Drop in Polyform Shield to defend against AWS and others in one simple move as you would have used MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses in the past.
henryfjordan 6y ago
The PolyForm Shield license prohibits competition with the original project, but then goes on to define "competition" > Goods and services compete even when provided free of charge If you host your project on Github under this license and I fork it, then my Github page is competing with yours and I am therefore in violation.
- orlandohill 6y ago
  Please read the license terms carefully. Distribution of the source code, modified or unmodified, would not be considered competition. On the contrary, it is an explicitly granted right. So, for example, forking on GitHub is allowed. Distribution License The licensor grants you an additional copyright license to distribute copies of the software. Your license to distribute covers distributing the software with changes and new works permitted by Changes and New Works License.
  - henryfjordan 6y ago
    I did read it carefully, and provided thoughtful feedback. > Any purpose is a permitted purpose, except for providing any product that competes with the software or any product the licensor or any of its affiliates provides using the software. > Goods and services compete even when provided free of charge. If you market a product as a practical substitute for the software or another product, it definitely competes. If I use your software and find a bug, I am prohibited from hosting a fork with a fix for the bug on Github as it would clearly be a practical substitute for the original.

carlhjerpe 6y ago

Just curious, what does distributing sourcecode mean? If I fork on github and push a change, am I then distributing sourcecode?

andrewshadura 6y ago
Yes.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  That is quite weird, i guess they'd never go after people for doing this "the right way". But it's not nice being in breach of license without ill intent.

StavrosK 6y ago

Reading the comments here, it seems to me that there are two sides to the debate: One side says it's not FOSS unless it's completely free, and the other side says it's fine for a small subset of use cases to lose a modicum of freedom if it means that everyone else benefits with more software that's essentially OSS. I think that what the "purist" view is not considering so much is that, when it comes to a company like Timescale, the choice isn't between "OSI" and "source available", it's between "source available" and "closed source". They're a company that wants to make a profit from the software it spends resources to develop. The debate seems to be mostly on whether this license should be called "open source", but I think there's an implicit value judgement there, which I'd like to make explicit. I'd like to clarify that, given that it's almost impossible to make money when AWS can just take your OSS product and undercut you, Timescale is doing us all a great service by giving us a product for free and making the source available. However, does it really make sense to argue over the license is OSS or not? The FOSS ecosystem has a monetization problem, and it's largely being funded by our collective donation of our time. I think that having options that allow us to grow the ecosystem in a sustainable way is important, even if they aren't as pure as we'd all like. Practicality usually beats purity, and "source available" is better than "closed source". I haven't really seen any concrete dangers that come from a "source available" license, especially any that make it worse than just having no source (which is the real alternative here), so if anyone could educate me, I would be grateful.

marcinzm 6y ago
Language matters and distinctions matter and branding matters. If you believe that OSS > Source Available > Closed Source that doesn't mean you want the concept of OSS to be diluted by Source Available. If you want to release a Source Available piece of code then all the power to you. But don't call it Open Source Software (or whatever vague variant of that implication you use) unless it actually is. Source Available should stand or fall on it's own merits and not by trying to co-opt the goodwill that OSS has built up over the last many decades. edit: This is a license that doesn't allow source code modifications to be released and only after feedback does it even allow you to run source code modifications privately. That very much is not in the "spirit of open source."

doctor_eval 6y ago

I’m not much of a fan of AWS, but when Amazon takes a “free as in speech AND beer” product and turns it into SaaS, that’s pretty much the expected outcome since (a) the license allows it and (b) companies exist to make money. Why would Amazon spend more than necessary to create this service? It’s not that they’re intrinsically evil for doing this; it’s literally how the rules are written. If you want to change that world, you need to change the rules. So I think this direction for complex, expensive to create “open” backend software is inevitable, and that dogmatic appeals to some formal and restrictive definition of openness are philosophically naive. Arguments that Timescale is not open remind me again of the paradox of tolerance [0]. This basically says that a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance. This is because a tolerant society is vulnerable to intolerance; a tolerant society, by definition, fails when it allows intolerance. Similarly, I am quite comfortable to consider software “open” if I can download it, build it, and use it in my products; even if it is closed in some specific dimension that is required for it to exist. It’s a shame in theory that I can’t create a little TSaaS without Timescale’s approval, but it’s not a right that most people care about, and I prefer that to a world in which the Timescale product itself doesn’t exist. Ultimately, it’s an argument between dogmatic openness and pragmatic openness. I’m decidedly in the pragmatic camp on this one. And FWIW, my recollection is that OSI itself was created in order to extend and formalise the definition of “open” to include pragmatically open licenses beyond the GPL. (I could be wrong here, it was a long time ago and I was not involved, but I seem to remember discussions on slashdot and technocrat) In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance edited to clarify.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
> In any case, I think that any academic discussion of the definition of “open” needs to take into account the paradox that perhaps, by requiring dogmatic adherence to the definition of “open”, we cause the world to be more closed. Which is, I think, not what we want. Thank you for putting this so succinctly.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

> Rights previously granted (and still allowed) under Timescale License > Right to run unmodified TimescaleDB for internal use > Right to utilize unmodified TimescaleDB to offer a Value Added Service > Right to distribute unmodified Source and Binaries as part of Value Added Product > Right to modify TimescaleDB for internal development and testing, and subsequently upstream modifications to Timescale Do you can still run modified (or unmodified) "community edition" timescale in an SaaS configuration right? Also it sounds like you can actually run unmodified TimeScaleDB (Timescale license w/ all the enterprise features) as long as you add some value (is easy setup value? Do I need to like automatically shard or something on top of it?)... Am I misunderstanding? I'd love to run a postgres aaS provider for fun someday and I'd like to use timescale as one of the supported addons.

andrewshadura 6y ago

Calling your users leeches while being leeches yourselves, how ironic.

nottorp 6y ago

I wonder if the Star Wars clip in the blog post is licensed :)

kdtsh 6y ago

I've been thinking very hard about introducing Timescale as a replacement for Cassandra in an application which is starting to show its age (when it was first built in the early 2010s, Cassandra was the only player in the game - but Cassandra never was a great time-series database). One thing which has made me wary of Timescale is the source-available license - which is great and all, but if the license changes significantly to make it more restrictive then we end up in a tough spot. A constant sticking point of Cassandra is that it's Apache Cassandra - it's very unlikely the license is ever going to become more restrictive, since it's owned by the ASF. This looks like a great development though, and I'm warming even more to further exploring Timescale. Something I'm still trying to understand: does not allowing database-as-a-service just mean that you can't have, say, an application which abstracts away the details of implementing a Timescale database (e.g. you input some kind of configuration file which describes the details of your deployment) without violating the TSL? Are you still allowed to leverage Timescale in your SaaS?

drpebcak 6y ago
The distinction they try to make is whether or not timescale is a ‘value added’ thing or not. You can’t provide a customer with a hosted timescaledb for them to use as the service, but you can provide a dashboard that stores data in timescale.