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The "you can always fork Citus" argument is not workable.

Scaling databases is an expert skill that is far out of reach for almost everyone.

Far easier just to pick another database that includes HA and horizontal scalability out of the box.

Sharding databases is not such a dark, magic art. Citus relies on Postgres for many key features; and Citus does the rest. It's already quite "feature complete".

If Citus would become proprietary overnight, my main concerns of maintaining a fork would be around the codebase and the language expertise more than the sharding concepts.

Note that sharding is different from a purely distributed database. The latter is an entirely different class (and more complex system).

The more likely scenario is that Citus simply disappears entirely and becomes an internal feature of Azure.

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