Evolving ArangoDB's Licensing Model for a Sustainable Future
arangodb.com
arangodb.com
> Our commitment to open-source ideals remains unshaken.
Except for the fact that you are no longer using an open source license. So not so much committed to it as abandoning it.
However, the way they've also changed “community edition” builds to forbid commercial usage is kinda fucked up.
it's not a long time. it's inconvenient, for sure.
And, to save others the click, they're using the "4 year cliff" version
Not taking a side on this, but just for historical context: the business source license was originally created by MariaDB, who referred to it as "BSL" and continue to do so [1]. So in the database world, calling it "BSL" is not especially unusual.
If I understand correctly, SPDX already assigned BSL as the short-code for the Boost Software License, so they assigned BuSL to the Business Source License.
Although the Boost Software License has been around since 2003, aside from Boost using it (obviously) it doesn't seem to be a popular choice among other projects.
So adopters of the Business Source License then have to choose between agreeing with the license's creators vs agreeing with SPDX.
So yeah, the real dragon here is Amazon in my opinion. The projects don't have a choice. It's either BSL/AGPL or dead project.
In the world of enterprise, nobody is gonna introduce a new hosting provider if they already have all the ISO audits for AWS or Azure.
AGPL is an infinitely better choice than BSL. Nobody would have been upset had they switched to that instead.
I just looked at their repo and it seems pretty popular. However, all the top contributors seem to be based in Cologne, Germany. I guess the headquarters are there. Not a lot of outside contributions happening either. I.e. not a very vibrant/healthy oss community around this product. I don't think AWS even has an office there. So I take the lack of their involvement and interest as a given here. But please correct me if I'm wrong. This also makes a fork unlikely. There's a distinct lack of any external stakeholders here. Short of the original developers leaving and forking, that's just unlikely to happen.
Their market seems to be the multi-model database market, where you also can run queries on the database without needing hacky "documents as views". They are also a somewhat alternative to neo4j, so I guess the graph database purpose is also there.
Whether or not they can be scaled on the same level, like you implied, especially with the necessary tooling for replication, synchronization and balancing ... is a whole other question.
Maybe someone that uses ArangoDB in production can chime in?
A problem for us is the Enterprise licensing is implemented such that our on-prem customers would have to manually update a license string once a year, which is a PITA and why we have previously been using Community edition despite paying for Enterprise (mostly for the support contract).
I'd suspect this is less about the biggest players like AWS and Azure and more about the intermediate space that seems to be highly competitive.
* Stay open source, switch to AGPL so AWS/Google won't use it
* Stop being open source, but just say that's what you're doing instead of this dishonest "we <3 open source (just kidding we're not actually doing pen source)"
I think being honest with your intentions up front has value, and you can charge for your software in a way that doesn't create a financial cliff when converting from free to paid (make up margins with volume etc).
I hope the rest of the ecosystem starts to feel this way and becomes comfortable paying for software again, especially from a sustainability perspective.
I guess they mean startups funded during the past few years when US VCs were awash with cash.
In a post-ZIRP world, many public tech company valuations have been slashed, and tech IPOs have slowed. Not-yet-profitable private tech companies can struggle to raise funding rounds now at favorable valuations, compared to their last funding round. If you're a VC-funded open source company with no deep moat, this is not a good time. I agree with the GP, we'll likely see more new companies choosing non-open-source but still source-available (e.g. BSL or SSPL) from the start.
https://arangodb.com/2021/10/announcing-arangodb-series-b-fu...
I don’t think that Venture Capital and open source companies mix. The monetization at the scale needed for venture capital is just not there.
To clarify, a venture backed company can use, make, and release open source, but open source should not be the source of its revenue.
We can all keep blabbering that it's not open source anymore, and blah blah, but the reality is that development of such systems is incredibly time consuming, and costs real money. Providing hosted solutions and offering some sirt of consultancy are the only 2 realistic income streams for the people who actually have built 99% of that.
Companies like Amazon destroy this because of their greed.
1. AWS never provided a hosted Mongo instance. You know who did? Small startups that provided better support than MongoDB Inc., without the scummy "just dump money into MongoDB Atlas! It will solve all your problems! I promise!" spiel that the marketing company in disguise shoved down its customers' throats (even paying customers).
MongoDB Inc. went around buying out these startups for cents on the dollar right before they publicly announced the license change.
2. AWS did provide a hosted ElasticSearch service. And they did contribute code in return. Amazon's patches to ES included oft-requested security features that ES upstream flat out refused to merge because that'd harm ES corporate's monetization strategy of demanding money for basic security. ES community edition was not a good citizen of the Open Source world.
3. You don't hear this kind of FUD from the PostgreSQL community. Because that is an actually Open Source project with a really good community. Amazon participates in it as a full member of the community: contributing dev time to not just get their features in, but to also review patches that have nothing to do with AWS and of no benefit to them, to even paying for PG evangelism.
4. AWS provides no hosted ArangoDB service.
Re (2) I think elastic's failure to shift into a cloud/saas company is something of an own goal/failure to execute probably because of misplaced sales incentives and sales in logging and security giving a distorted lens into the community but Amazon very clearly strip mined their community as well.
Re (3) that's completely untrue... there are about 15 companies competing for postgres and postgres-like mindshare right now and you sure as hell better believe most of them believe the hyperscalers' anti-competitive approach to going to market is a major impediment to their own ability to be stay viable and execute.
Re (4) that's because it is not yet popular enough to see ROI from strip mining... but presumably the creators want it to become popular
- Developers as a target market being exceptionally hard to market/sell to and incredibly price sensitive. You have to give away huge amounts of value upfront and hope you can make up the difference later.
- Layer in, depending on your perspective, some healthy concern about needing to have ownership of the core parts of your stack or cynicism about trusting a third-party with your things.
- free + source available becomes the conventional wisdom about how to overcome these issues and reach your audience. I’m the process this also gets conflated with “OSS” because we didn’t know better/that was the precedent.
- a whole generation of people are encouraged to default to an incredibly permissive OSS for all their projects. It’s actually super cool and a lot of novel ideas emerge as a result.
- some of these become wildly popular. The inventors/maintainers think they should probably build a business around this.
- They go raise a VC round on the back of their OSS success. Now there’s a lot of pressure to generate VC outcomes.
- They start by selling consulting/enterprise support/etc because RedHat was the role model for how to build a successful OSS business.
- they realise that is actually super hard and unlikely to actually drive the VC outcome they need.
- they pivot into a SaaS/cloud model instead. The growth and margin potential looks like it stacks up better given the outcomes they’re after.
- they eventually discover that simply running the software for you isn’t as lucrative as they thought. For a start, thinking you’re the best at running it purely because you invented it is pure hubris. That’s true at the start, but it doesn’t take much scale for the nuanced expertise of running one specific piece of software is overshadowed by the complexities of running and connecting thousands of anything.
- so… right at the point when you’re beginning to be weighed down by being a victim of your own success, is the same point where the various other vendors who are good at scale are getting pushed to address an opportunity. They’ve customers lining up saying “hey, we want to use X. But we don’t want to run it ourselves, but we want it inside our VPC. With all of the IAM and other controls we’ve come to expect with everything else”. And so the vendors respond.
- The creators change the license in a scramble to buy more time while they work out what’s actually wrong with their business model.
The problem is people trying to sell and OSS product. You’ve already given it away! The thing people pay for needs to be a _completely different_ but complementary product. If that product is “we’ll run software” then don’t be surprised if you find yourself competing with other companies who have more experience in running software (sidebar: I think Instaclustr is a fascinating example of what it would look like to actually lean into this. Don’t run just one piece of software well, carve out a niche at being the best of running any OSS data layer). Even RedHat had a different product: the support.
But the answer has always been that you need a paid enterprise product that has a _feature set_ that you haven’t already given away. Maybe you access that via a cloud service. Maybe it’s an in prem run it yourself thing. Maybe it’s actual humans putting their hands on the keys.
I do not see at this level of popularity big clouds to start provide ArangoDB as a service to really compete with them
Is this an act of desperation to raise some additional funds, telling to investors they are protected from cloud competition ? Something else ?
This is why we have the GPL, people. Defend your hard work.
Eg, you can have a private fork you use at work. You can host it for your own use anywhere you want.
I just want to retain the exclusive rights to sell it.
So 2 questions;
Is this not open source?
What’s a palatable license if you want to be able to sell a hosted version of your product?
The OSI, FSF and DFSG would all agree that this is not open source if it imposes field of use restrictions.
> What’s a palatable license if you want to be able to sell a hosted version of your product?
The old approach here was to do open core, where the core software is open source but enterprisey wants like SAML/OIDC, auditing features, etc. were in a seperate edition. This generally doesn't get the same hostility as this type of license, where only old (and insecure versions) are available for open source usage.
Or just accept that what you want _isn't_ open source, and go for source-available with a freeware edition. Just don't expect to have your cake and eat it with the publicity and profile boost of open source and the exclusive commercialization ability of proprietary software.
I think at this point of their development they need to find a way to drive more adoption and ditching Open Source is unlikely to help