Good License for a Database?

2 points·Ankaios··9 comments

If you started creating a new database system today, what license would you choose? I am picturing a system that could be installed locally—not just used as a cloud service. What sorts of considerations do you think are particularly important?

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When we selected Apache 2.0 license for ClickHouse[1] in 2016, the reasons were the following:

Why it is better than MIT and BSD: - it contains the "3. Grant of Patent License."

Why it is better than GPL and AGPL: - it does not impose confusion for the usage in big companies.

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/

Paid proprietary, because it would preclude important categories of rationales for laziness and because there would be obvious and appropriate incentives for doing the grunt work to solve other people’s problems.

I mean if I am just building something to tickle my own fancy, I don’t need a license.

YMMV. Good luck.

You can learn something from Mongo or Elastic search histories.

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

It's worth noting that the Elastic license change gave rise to OpenSearch which has been eating into their user base

What is your goal? Are you looking for contributors? Do you have plan for monetization?

I'm trying to be a little vague to avoid accidentally veering the discussion too much in some direction, but I'd prefer to be as open as possible while somehow building a community or organization that reliably continues maintenance (especially security updates) and improvements. I've been mulling a hosted option to bring in revenue. At the same time, I'm curious about the choices other people would make based on different priorities.

Do you have an email address?

If you want big companies to use it, prob MIT or Apache

AGPLv3

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