Read on Twitter
We’re doing this while building a sustainable open-source business. How? Because of the Timescale License, our source-available license that governs many of our advanced features.
THREAD on open-source licensing and a classic David vs. Goliath story (trigger warning!) 2/
THREAD on open-source licensing and a classic David vs. Goliath story (trigger warning!) 2/
Not that long ago, the open-source business model was straightforward: companies run your software, and when they need help or advanced capabilities, they pay you for commercial support or enterprise features. 3/
That was the world in which today’s open-source licenses were written. But the world has changed. Today companies would rather pay someone to run your software, obviating the need for paid support and making selling enterprise capabilities harder. 4/
The standard open-source licenses allow anyone to completely commercialize your software and leave you without a way to self-sustain your project. In other words, the rise of the Cloud has cut off the primary business model for open-source software. 5/
Enter new licenses from @TimescaleDB, @Elastic, @Confluentinc, and others. These licenses, which we call “Cloud Protection Licenses”, maintain an open-source spirit, but protect the right of offering the software in the cloud for the main creator/maintainer of the project. 6/
This "cloud protection" is what enables open-source businesses like ours to thrive in an era where the trillion dollar clouds squelch innovation and competition by co-opting our work. 7/
But why create a new license - why not just compete with public clouds by just providing the best product experience on a level playing field? Because the playing field is far from level. 8/
Today the public clouds (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) are trillion dollar corporations - the largest in the world - and have many advantages from that size: eg market position, pricing power, deep balance sheets. They exploit this power in ways that hinder competition. 9/
They lock-in large customers into prepaid, multi-year enterprise-wide agreements with discounts, and lock-in startups with $100,000s of free credits. 10/
Yet even with 100,000s of employees and billions of dollars, they did not develop @TimescaleDB, @Elastic, @ConfluentInc, and countless other open-source projects. These were built by independent teams dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art. 11/
Open-source companies represent a massive amount of innovation in our industry. We are scrappy, entrepreneurial teams of rebels taking on not one, but three large software empires.
Cloud protection licenses give us a fighting chance. 12/
Cloud protection licenses give us a fighting chance. 12/
Ever since we first launched the Timescale License (TSL) two years ago, feedback from the software developer community has been overwhelmingly positive. Developers understand the world is changing and want us to remain self-sustaining. 13/
Today we& #39;re updating the TSL, which governs many of our advanced features - including native compression, multi-node, continuous aggregations - based on developer feedback, to provide even more rights to users. 14/
Notably, this update adds the “right-to-repair”, the “right-to-improve”, and eliminates the paid enterprise tier and usage limits altogether (thus establishing that all of our software will be available for free). 15/
If you are a current or future user of TimescaleDB, these changes mean that you have more rights. But if you are looking to provide TimescaleDB-as-a-service, you are still restricted to only offering the Apache-2 edition. 16/
Today you can deploy TimescaleDB yourself on your own infra for free. Or, if you prefer, you can let us run TimescaleDB for you, on our industry-leading, fully-managed, multi-cloud service that runs on AWS, Azure, and GCP. https://blog.timescale.com/blog/fully-managed-time-series-data-service-now-available-in-aws-azure-gcp-75-regions-compare-vs-influxdb-timestream/?utm_source=timescaledb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pr-2020&utm_content=cloud-momentum-blog">https://blog.timescale.com/blog/full... 17/
(Yes, the public clouds are our competitors AND our suppliers. Yes, they have a lot of market power.) 18/
By updating the Timescale License and focusing on our cloud service, we can continue to invest in our community by releasing our best features to be completely free to use self-hosted, while maintaining a sustainable business model. 19/
More in this major blog post that myself and @michaelfreedman co-authored and published today. https://tsdb.co/tsl-v2 ">https://tsdb.co/tsl-v2&qu... 20/20
