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Comment by LukeEF | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, Timescale is not like the others, their shift was to make the formerly proprietary enterprise only code source available. Remarkably they went MORE open rather than less (as it the case for all the others).

You have to give them respect for approaching things differently.

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I don't think it's really that different. Elastic did that same thing about three years ago when they made all of their enterprise-only features source-available (https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open). Timescale also made their enterprise features free of charge, but that's a business decision rather than a question of licensing. It's because their revenue model is based completely on their managed cloud offering while Elastic still gets non-trivial revenue from selling their enterprise features to customers who want them.

Is this an elastic employee throwaway? How is going from a more permissive license to less permissive one "not really that different" than the inverse?!

Thanks for the clarification, Luke.

For a bit more background for the HN community:

When we initially launched the Timescale License in Dec 2018, we didn't relicense any of our Apache-2 code -- that was and has always remained licensed under the Apache 2 license. Instead, we effectively were "pre-announcing" that some future advanced features (yet to be developed) would instead be released under the Timescale License or under a paid-only commercial license (although still source-available).

Fast forward to September 2020 and Timescale 2.0, and we (i) made some aspects of the Timescale License more permissive (e.g., "right to repair", "right to improve"), and (ii) moved all the previously enterprise (paid-only) features to be available for free under the Timescale License. Hope that helps!

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...

TimescaleDB licensing is mightily confusing. Instead of clarifying here, you might want to provide clear licensing info for all your products on your webpage.

Happy (non-paying) user otherwise, but this is a bit shady in my eyes.

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