> will you make it as easy as setting up a docker container or helm chart?
Yes, likely docker-compose in the short term (for our "local emulator"), and then something more prod-friendly later. Licensing is always a tough decision - we build client libraries for every tool we use, which are MIT licensed. Tools we build ourselves (like the Realtime server), are licensed under Apache 2.0. As you point out, we've started with our hosted platform because we feel this is important (as a business). This par is not yet public (also for security) and we may have to license it with a BSD license when we do open source it.
> a subscribable DB engine that handles denormalization
One of my favourite topics, and something we've been thinking about for months. It's incredibly hard to solve, especially when you add in Row Level Security and conflict resolution. Our current thinking is some sort of client store, using CRDTs that infer types from the database. We have some ideas for this but it's very early days. I'd love to talk to Liron - I'll reach out.