It saved us continuing our evaluation of it when our sales contact told us. Our company has a strict nope on basic infra licenses; closed is not an option. We need to be able to switch (and test everything all the time on the open version if we use binaries). We have been building software for over 35 years now and we have been bitten too many times.
Yes, but that's not an option for our lawyers; we need the actual freedom to do whatever. Source available is not a thing for us; it's not about the source (we will probably not ever touch it anyway), it is about the freedom when they go out of business, change the rules , etc. But I am not a lawyer but I do agree: we gladly pay licenses and support but if things go crazy (upping the prices to stupid amounts etc) we need to be able to get out without many issues.
It’s always kind of a relief when I can completely remove something from my long list of things to check out. Life’s too short to bother with proprietary platforms. A closed source database? Hah, no.
> Licensor grants You a limited, non-exclusive, revocable, non-sublicensable, non-transferable,
For now it's source-available with generous limit, but this can be changed or revoked at any time, and this may immediately make your existing installations illegal.
Tomato, tomato. If it’s not FOSS, I’m not going to sign off on wasting time on it.
(Yes, of course I use proprietary services where necessary and they can’t be avoided. This isn’t one of those cases. Example of things where I’m pretty adamant about it: server OSes. Databases. Programming languages. Web servers.)
Source available doesn't allow you to build on that software or patch it the way you see fit.
Heck, even some source available licenses doesn't allow you to compile that thing, let alone get parts and use it elsewhere.
However, I somewhat like source available licenses currently, because they're neat little mines that sneak in to training sets of generative AI models and make the models less suitable for serious work.
Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of https://seastar.io that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.
> ScyllaDB OSS AGPL 6.2 will stand as the final OSS AGPL release... A free tier of the full-featured ScyllaDB Enterprise will be available.
I wonder if this means YDB (from the devs of Clickhouse) will get some traction (https://ydb.tech/) or if there are other massive scale scylladb-types of DB's out there.
You can click the link, but both are attractive; yugabyte and ydb; they are now 'newsql' as people call it I think; sql that scales without the pain (of course there is pain, but other pain). Both have good licenses. Yugabyte is a mixed license, but the apache parts are enough for our use for instance.
I'm surprised it didn't get more upvotes, but probably because most people missed it at this time of year. (I did the first time too)
I found it kinda surprising (it's kinda tough when a primary DB choice is no longer open source!), although not that surprising given the fact that this keeps happening to VC-backed DB startups.
VC backed or not, what is the launch trajectory? Any DB that gets even a little bit of traction is quickly turned into a hosted service by one of the major cloud providers with full support, eliminating the primary path to revenue for these devs. Their options are??
Patreon and pray or go broke?
The Redhat model just doesn’t work in 2024 with the sharks constantly looking for fresh meat.
It saved us continuing our evaluation of it when our sales contact told us. Our company has a strict nope on basic infra licenses; closed is not an option. We need to be able to switch (and test everything all the time on the open version if we use binaries). We have been building software for over 35 years now and we have been bitten too many times.
Am I wrong in thinking you can still compile Scylla after the change as it's source available? You just also need a license, right?
Yes, but that's not an option for our lawyers; we need the actual freedom to do whatever. Source available is not a thing for us; it's not about the source (we will probably not ever touch it anyway), it is about the freedom when they go out of business, change the rules , etc. But I am not a lawyer but I do agree: we gladly pay licenses and support but if things go crazy (upping the prices to stupid amounts etc) we need to be able to get out without many issues.
It’s always kind of a relief when I can completely remove something from my long list of things to check out. Life’s too short to bother with proprietary platforms. A closed source database? Hah, no.
Indeed.
your comment made me think I read it wrong, but it's not closed source, they're just moving to a source available license...
> Licensor grants You a limited, non-exclusive, revocable, non-sublicensable, non-transferable,
For now it's source-available with generous limit, but this can be changed or revoked at any time, and this may immediately make your existing installations illegal.
Tomato, tomato. If it’s not FOSS, I’m not going to sign off on wasting time on it.
(Yes, of course I use proprietary services where necessary and they can’t be avoided. This isn’t one of those cases. Example of things where I’m pretty adamant about it: server OSes. Databases. Programming languages. Web servers.)
Source available doesn't allow you to build on that software or patch it the way you see fit.
Heck, even some source available licenses doesn't allow you to compile that thing, let alone get parts and use it elsewhere.
However, I somewhat like source available licenses currently, because they're neat little mines that sneak in to training sets of generative AI models and make the models less suitable for serious work.
A database license that only lets you store 10TB data might as well be closed source
“Source available” is within the common usage of the term “closed source” which is simply the negation of “open source”.
Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of https://seastar.io that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.
> ScyllaDB OSS AGPL 6.2 will stand as the final OSS AGPL release... A free tier of the full-featured ScyllaDB Enterprise will be available.
I wonder if this means YDB (from the devs of Clickhouse) will get some traction (https://ydb.tech/) or if there are other massive scale scylladb-types of DB's out there.
I am hoping ydb gets a little easier to use in general, and supports some things I use from postgres.
Is ydb same as yugabyte?
You can click the link, but both are attractive; yugabyte and ydb; they are now 'newsql' as people call it I think; sql that scales without the pain (of course there is pain, but other pain). Both have good licenses. Yugabyte is a mixed license, but the apache parts are enough for our use for instance.
It seems like it stands for Yandex DB?
no, they are different technologies
Discussion (64 points, 6 days ago, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457680
I'm surprised it didn't get more upvotes, but probably because most people missed it at this time of year. (I did the first time too)
I found it kinda surprising (it's kinda tough when a primary DB choice is no longer open source!), although not that surprising given the fact that this keeps happening to VC-backed DB startups.
VC backed or not, what is the launch trajectory? Any DB that gets even a little bit of traction is quickly turned into a hosted service by one of the major cloud providers with full support, eliminating the primary path to revenue for these devs. Their options are??
Patreon and pray or go broke?
The Redhat model just doesn’t work in 2024 with the sharks constantly looking for fresh meat.
That is a shame. Scylladb seemed like a useful database.
They intentionally waited til after the AWS reInvent conference to announce this.
[from the FAQs] Where can I find the source code?
The source code will be available at https://github.com/scylladb/scylladb. Commit notes and comments will also be available in the same repo.