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0 pointspauldix5y ago0 comments

It's under a community license, which has restrictions. The limitations on derivative works and value added products or services are the ones that will create the most problem for people trying to build a business on it: https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses

For users within large organizations, they're likely not able to use the software without approval from their legal department because it doesn't fall under any open source license.

Like I said, whether you care is really case dependent.

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avthar5y ago

This is misinformation. Most of TimescaleDB is open source under Apache 2. The difference is that the advanced features of TimescaleDB - Eg clustering - are under a source available license and are free, while advanced InfluxDB features like clustering are under a paid enterprise license. In fact TimescaleDB recently made all of our enterprise features available for free. So one could argue that TimescaleDB is more open than Influx.

For more information on TimescaleDB licensing, check out this blog post: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...

(Disclaimer/ fyi: I work at Timescale)

pauldixOP5y ago

My post is about InfluxDB IOx, which is the project this thread is about. You're correct about InfluxDB having HA and clustering under a closed source enterprise license. If you read the post, I even mention this as a shortcoming of the project. One which we're hoping to rectify with InfluxDB IOx.

So some parts of Timescale are under actual Apache 2 and some parts are under a proprietary source available license. I'm not sure what the LOC of which is which, or how it's actually organized in your repo. I'll leave it up to your potential users to try to figure out which and disentangle what parts are actually open.

As I recall, AWS very publicly forked Elastic because of this very same type of confusion. The difference is that if AWS were going to fork your project, they'd just fork Postgres, which is the real open source software that you're benefitting from.

If I were building an developer focused analytics, monitoring, or data analysis product, I wouldn't do it on top of Timescale because some parts of your codebase most definitely prevent that through your license. But that's me.

mfreed5y ago

> If I were building an developer focused analytics, monitoring, or data analysis product, I wouldn't do it on top of Timescale because some parts of your codebase most definitely prevent that through your license. But that's me.

That's also FUD, two ways.

First, what the Timescale License prevents is somebody offering our Community Edition as a standalone "TimescaleDB-as-a-Service", a la AWS bundling it as part of RDS, or Microsoft as part of Azure Postgres. There is a clean technical test for "DDL access to the database" by users in the license. It's not tricky. You can absolutely develop/sell/distribute/provide analytics, monitoring, or data analysis products on top of TimescaleDB Community Edition. Many companies do.

As to "hopelessly-entangled source", if you know what a directory is, you can tell the difference. There's a "/tsl" subdirectory with Timescale Licensed code. Everything else is Apache2. You can compile pure Apache-2 versions with a single compile flag, and we distribute Apache2 binaries. In fact, the Postgres community itself distributes Apache-2 binaries, and Microsoft, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, and other clouds make the Apache2 version available as part of the managed database offerings.

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