(ScyllaDB employee here)
I don't believe one would need a commercial license just to test a product in any way? They are not making that part of any product at that point, so no concerns here.
I don't believe one would need a commercial license just to test a product in any way? They are not making that part of any product at that point, so no concerns here.
Fake data, non-userfacing servers, sure.
If I'm trying a products evaluation license, you can be sure I've tried literally every other option under the sun first, including investigating the possibility rolling my own if situationally appropriate. No form of development is slower than the kind where I have to wait for a company in another timezone to give me permission to use their software, so it's always last on my options list unless the company has frankly amazing reviews that pique my curiosity.
I don't like the AGPL because it's unclear on this exact sort of thing, but it does seem to me like the obvious reading of "all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network" does not encompass the connection between Instagram end users and their internal Cassandra.
And, in any case, they released sources for the thing they came up with - which is all that the AGPL requires. If they're okay with doing that, they can definitely use the AGPL for production commercial software.
I guess the weird case is that when I'm using the Instagram app, I wouldn't say I'm personally interacting with even the Instagram front-end servers (the way I am in a browser), I'm just interacting with the app which happens to use the servers. And that does sound like not what the license authors would like.