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Comment by cevian | Hacker News Reader

And we never call it Open Source!

(Timescale engineer here)

For what it's worth, TSL is a great source-available/restrictive-for-clouds license in my opinion, and I'm glad Timescale went the direction of moving from a more restrictive license to a more permissive license rather than the other way around.

While AGPL is a value-add for many, TSL isn't as ambiguous in some regards and provides a lot of nice "we won't sue you for this" clauses for users. Clear communication regarding its FOSS status will only help!

The whole issue arose from the claim that the Timescale license was designed to be less restrictive then the AGPL.

That's why Open Source came up in the first place - pointing out that one of the basic reasons for the Timescale license to exist in the first place is to restrict one of the major reasons Open Source licenses exist.

That only makes sense if you agree with the open source foundation definition of restrictive. I don't. I think the ability to freely link to whatever other software is much more important to most people than the ability to run a *aaS. We never made any claims about open source only our opinion about what restrictive means to us.

That's fine. I wasn't taking a position. I was explaining why people were using Open Source as a comparison.

There were also no claims about whatever definition of restrictive you were using. It was just a short statement that the Timescale license was designed to be less restrictive than the AGPL. You can't really be that surprised when somebody comes along and starts judging it by Open Source standards after that, can you?

That's fair but I was more replying to the OP that said "but it shouldn't be called an Open Source license". The point is we don't call our license Open Source.

Comparisons to Open Source and discussions of the pros and cons of both approaches are, of course, fair.

AGPL license clearly gives you the ability to freely link with whatever software you want. The only requirement is to share it with your customers. Following your logic it could be said that MIT licensed software could not be freely used because it requires preservation of original copyright notice

>That only makes sense if you agree with the open source foundation definition of restrictive.

I think Timescale employees should remember to preface "This is our belief on the definition of restrictive" when describing the license as more open than open source licenses, given much of the community might disagree (sometimes vehemently) about that take.

Or scope it as "less restrictive for most users" or something along those lines.

That may indeed have been more accurate. But this is a HN comment thread after all, we can't capture all subtleties of a very complex debate. :)

Totally fair. My initial comment was a little rushed. :-)

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