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Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Too bad it's not Free Software.

I think this is an important point, and I know it often derided as people asking a company to give something away for free, so I want to defend it.

I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the console could use a few usability improvements that an interested OSS developer could add, but that don't happen. It's frustrating that the Client wire protocol hasn't been released yet, so support for non-JVM languages (which are provided by the community and do not have official Cognitect support) are stuck using the deprecated and unsupported REST interface.

I am not ideologically against proprietary software, I just think Datomic would be orders of magnitude more useful with an active OSS ecosystem around it.

I am regularly alarmed by the fact that nobody has tried to make an open source clone yet..

Well, why would they? Clones would be using relatively old technology. The current bleeding-edge research here is on more-structured, more-formal knowledge representation, stuff like FQL/AQL [0] which is open-source from the first day. Maybe Datomic's not sufficiently better than Pg or SQLite to motivate anybody.

[0] http://categoricaldata.net/fql.html

That looks very interesting! Do you have a recommended point of entry for a non-academic practitioner like myself? :)

What about:

https://github.com/mozilla/mentat https://github.com/tonsky/datascript

Mentat is built for embedding, not for large applications. Datascript is in-memory for browsers.

But you're right, it's not fair to say that there's not been any effort! :)

Work is beeing done to transition datascript into a a much more database like thing:

"datahike is a durable database with an efficient datalog query engine. This project is a port of datascript to the hitchhiker-tree."

https://github.com/replikativ/datahike

Interesting, keep 'em coming!

Historical information is not part of datahike, now and it's not on the roadmap as far as I can tell. But perhaps one day :)

Do they respond to users comments too ?

Rich Hickey has responded to this many times. They made Clojure free and open source and have put lots of their own $$ into Clojure. If they want to make a product that costs money, that is their choice. They also need to keep the lights on. Now if they won't let users who pay for the product see source-code under an NDA, that is a indeed a problem in my mind, but is pretty much just standard business practice. I have no clue if they're open in that area or not.

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