In fact, when we were looking at Timescale licensing, we took careful look at what a lot of other like company licenses did here (Confluent, Redis, etc), and what later became the Polyform License. Most of them left this definition pretty vague -- because frankly, legal language is never as precise (and perhaps shouldn't be) as what an engineer may like.
We went a step further, and tried to define this more precisely about what it means to "offer" TimescaleDB:
(iii) users of such Value Added Products or Services are prohibited,
either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or
modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database
objects, such as through use of the Timescale Data Definition Interfaces,
in a Timescale Database utilized by such Value Added Products or
Services.
What that means is that if you've defined the Heap schema, you have built the indexes and tables, and then are offering a SaaS product on this, you're fine:
- You are offering a product/marketing SaaS service around usage/product analytics, not a time-series-database-as-a-service
- You are not approaching the market and saying, "Here's how to get TimescaleDB-as-a-service" (unlike, say, Managed TimescaleDB running on Rackspace or Digital Ocean), you are saying "Here's a full Product/Marketing Analytics Solution".
- You are not giving your users direct/psql access to the raw database to define their tables/schemas/indexes and otherwise just treat that service as a hosted TimescaleDB instance.
I hope that helps!