8 ms·

This looks quite cool from a technical perspective, but the unusual license definitely gives me pause. Largely because I'm not familiar with BSL. Others say i

• romange 4y ago
  It's exactly that. It gives us a little chance to fight against the Giants. In 5 years the initial version becomes Apache 2.0 then the next version and so on and so forth. CockroachDB uses similar license. MariaDB uses that, Redpanda Data and others. You are right that acronym is confusing - it's not Boost license, it's Business License. Every major technological startup turned away from BSD/Apache 2.0 licenses due to inability to compete with cloud providers without technological edge.
  • JoshTriplett 4y ago
    I certainly don't think you should pick a permissive license, and find yourself under competition from companies running your own software. However, I'm sad that instead of going with an Open Source license that protects against that, you're using a proprietary license. That alone is a nonstarter for many users, not because they want to compete with you but because they want to protect themselves and make sure they have a firm foundation to build on. Much of the software you're citing as examples moved from Open Source to proprietary, harming their users in the process, and causing many users to seek alternatives.
    • jitl 4y ago
      Do you think AGPL offers such protection? I think even AGPL is fine for Amazon et al, they are happy to dump the code somewhere while selling a managed service with enough wrapper layers. But AGPL is toxic also for self-hosters who aren’t trying to build a managed hosting service, since it applies equally against all parties.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • rglullis 4y ago
        AGPL does not require source distribution of your application, unless the AGPL code is accessed directly by your users. So, if this were AGPL and I have an closed webservice that uses this, it is in the clear.
        • jitl 4y ago
          But then Amazon is free to host this as a paid service and take all the money.
          • rglullis 4y ago
            Redis is doing just fine, PostgreSQL is doing just fine. They are both real open source. The performance improvements are not worth the legal/compliance overhead of adding non-FOSS to my stack. Much less so if the performance improvements are due just to some optimization choice in the underlying system. In the next 5 years, it will be easier to have Redis adding the io_ring optimizations than for this new project to become uniquely better.
            • jitl 4y ago
              Now I’m curious where you work and how compliance requires FOSS!
              • rglullis 4y ago
    • romange 4y ago
      We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users. Lets not confuse the means and the goal here. AGPL is copyleft and restricting. Fair users refuse using it. OSI does not help technological companies to find a fair solution and force us to go outside of "OSS".
      • riquito 4y ago
        I don't want to enter in the merit of your company's choice, it's definitely up to you what license to use, but I'm confused about that statement around AGPL. How would AGPL harm users?
        • bpicolo 4y ago
          The lawyers often ban AGPL at tech cos
          • JoshTriplett 4y ago
            Which means they may pay for an alternative to the AGPL.
            • blackoil 4y ago
              More likely they'll ignore the s/w. Huge amount of talent is working in such companies. Using AGPL will practically exclude them from interacting with the s/w. Also, smaller companies like to play safe. If FAANG with their million lawyers aren't touching it, why should I take the risk.
              • true_religion 4y ago
                Because unlike FAANG you don’t have millions of engineers to create the software from scratch. Companies pay for databases (Oracle, Gemstone, MsSQL, anything at Amazon). Almost all the risks (price changes, maintenance costs, etc.) can be managed adequately via a long term enterprise contract.
          • 4y ago
  • benatkin 4y ago
    > Every major technological startup turned away from BSD/Apache 2.0 licenses due to inability to compete with cloud providers without technological edge. No, there are plenty that still use permissive licenses. GitLab uses MIT and a custom license for EE: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/licensing.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/licensing.html Deno uses an MIT license and has some secret sauce that is currently just in hosted services AFAIK: https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/LICENSE.md https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/LICENSE.md PlanetScale has hosted services and an open source tool called Vitess which is Apache licensed: https://planetscale.com/ https://planetscale.com/ https://github.com/vitessio/vitess https://github.com/vitessio/vitess Finally Redis has a BSD licensed core, a source available license for additional modules, and a closed source license for enterprise. https://redis.com/legal/licenses/ https://redis.com/legal/licenses/
    • romange 4y ago
      Redis has a BSD license because it was written by antirez who did not intend to make it a commercial enterprise. Today its too late to change and wont help Redis Inc to protect their ip. We looked at elastic, mongodb, cocroach labs, mariadb, redpanda, atlassian, grafana labs , scylladb. The last two are agpl but the motivation is the same: to protect themselves.
  • stinkiephish 4y ago
    Bravo for picking the BSL and writing your license the way you have. It shows maturity in that you and your company know what they are doing and intend to be there for the long haul.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • PeterZaitsev 4y ago
    MariaDB is GPL there are some enterprise components which are BSL. Was excited to see the project but now seeing it is not Open Source it means 1/10th of value