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Comment by xdanger | Hacker News Reader

It's just an extension. You can build the Apache 2.0 part of the extension and ignore the Timescale License parts. Those parts are mainly about multinode, compression and continuous aggregates.

TSL is mainly about not competing with their cloud offerings. So you can't run a database-as-a-service for time series data with it.

More about the license: https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business...

Comparison about the open source and community editions: https://docs.timescale.com/timescaledb/latest/timescaledb-ed...

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Why would I build a part of it manually when pgpartman is already available? It’s just an extension as its just code.

Regardless of what they say on a public page, that is a vague license. Can I use Timescale to provide a SaaS service that collects application traces, and I provide a DSL to query the database that is not exposing the DB directly? No, its a gray area.

"Can I use Timescale to provide a SaaS service that collects application traces, and I provide a DSL to query the database that is not exposing the DB directly?"

Yes you can. (Timescale co-founder here)

The vast majority of people using TimescaleDB use our community/open-source software (rather than managed Cloud), and vast vast majority of those use the TSL (Community) edition, including many as part of their SaaS service.

It's a three-part test for asking "is this a value added service?" [0] Given the way your have described your service, sounds like a clear "Yes".

- Is your SaaS service primarily different than a database product/service? Yes.

- Is the main value of your SaaS service different than that of a time-series database, and you aren't primarily offering your SaaS service as a time-series database? Yes.

- Are users prevented from directly defining internal table structures through the database DDL? Presumably yes.

[0] https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-...

As someone previously sceptical of the wording in your proprietary license, I appreciate the clarification for this use case & the rationale behind those license terms.

I asked this question in their chat, the CEO answered within minutes that it’s allowed.

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