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Comment by andre-z | Hacker News Reader

An open-source Pinecone alternative https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant With a cloud offering along https://cloud.qdrant.io with 1GB cluster for free to try out. Disclaimer: I'm part of the team.

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Curious with why you went for an Apache license. Aren’t you worried about copy-cat services? Or does the OSS version lack the scaling/distributed features that would be more difficult to replicate? I think that was ES’s fatal mistake and their licensing games are unlikely to pan out.

The Coral Project [0] (commenting platform used on Washington Post, New York Times, The Verge) uses an Apache 2.0 license [1]. Which doesn't seem to have prevented it from raking in big SaaS customers.

A lot of people worry about copy-cat services, but it's kind of rare that someone will be able to compete with you as the original in hosting your own service as well as you can. Especially when you consider support and maintenance requirements of a new product you aren't personally developing.

I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it?

[0] https://coralproject.net/

[1] https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/develop/LICENSE

> I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it?

The concern isn't random small companies. The concern is the big cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google. And you are right, they aren't going build out a hosted version of your product until there is enough traction. But at that point, customers might indeed trust them more than you to run your own software! Redis and Elastic ran into this problem for example.

The most likely scenario though - is never getting traction - so anything to improve traction such as permissive licensing is probably a better tradeoff.

I'll be honest, this did occur to me, but by the time it popped into my head, I had run out of time to add an edit addressing it.

Thanks for pointing it out so folks can be wary of AWS (and similar) eating their lunch like they have countless other SaaS services!

qdrant also pays open source contributors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35828003

disclaimer: i'm a founder at algora.io, the platform that enables these paid contributions

"Algora charges a 23% fee over your rewarded bounties (20% Algora fee + 3% Stripe fee). The fee is applied when you complete your bounty payments."

https://docs.algora.io/bounties/payments#compliance

If algora.io didn't charge %23 of the bounty I would have tried to contribute. It felt unfair to me.

hey ffback, contributors get 100% of the bounty award :) the organization pays the fee on top of the bounty. will update the docs to make this more clear, thank you!

The organization is willing to pay 123% of the bounty. So from the contributor pov algora's fee is 20/123~=16.2% still high IMHO.

They're willing to pay that amount for the bounty + managing and paying out bounties.

If they weren't paying Algora to do it, they'd be paying their own staff to do it. Either way, the extra percentage wouldn't be part of the bounty.

I'd gladly pay 23% just to not have to worry about the logistics of bounty payments.

But if I get a reward for 100 dollars and the company pays 123 dollars which you may not see in your statement then what's the problem?

A +1 for qdrant from a happy user. we use qdrant in production with a 50-100MM rows scale. Haven't experienced many bottlenecks thus far, and has performed quite well.

@qdrant_team: perhaps you should look into offering it as a service, a la pinecone.

edit: oops just checked your (updated) website and notice you have an offering already. Congrats! will check it out. ty =)

You are welcome! Feel free to reach out for the early adopter discount ;)

Perfect for our next zero shot model. We'll give it a spin!

Thanks for building this.

Is it different/better than https://milvus.io ?

Hey this is pretty cool! I will try it! Thanks for sharing it.

Might try this, using pinecone but there documentation even for simple use cases is pretty poor.

how much do one need to know of databases to work at qdrant? Sounds like a nice place to work, specially if remote

Well, to work on the core of the Qdrant engine https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant you should have some db knowledge but even more important are Rust skills. However, we have also other products, like the cloud platform https://cloud.qdrant.io there we are looking for different skills.

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