(founder/cto of YugaByte)

This is a very insightful suggestion, thanks for raising that! We had considered many of these variants until finally, we concluded that fully open is the best way.

PostgreSQL (which is the database on fire right now) got to this spot by being fully open and permissive - and embracing all forms of competition. In fact, PostgreSQL got rewritten from Lisp to C (which begs an interesting question - what is a database? The code or the query language? Anyway I digress).

We felt if we want to build something as foundational as PostgreSQL for the cloud, then we need to be as open.