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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)

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.

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.