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Comment by pmeira | Hacker News Reader

Compression and other features use the non-Apache license:

https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/tree/main/tsl

And as I understand that license, you are allowed to use Timescale for anything that doesn’t involve offering Timescale itself as a service. If you were using Timescale to process lots of time series transactions in your backend, it doesn’t seem to me like that would break the license.

(Which is to say that if, like Tembo, you’re offering Postgres as a service you do indeed have a problem. But for other use, should be fine)

The tricky thing with these licenses (BSL, SSPL, etc.) is that you can use them freely for internal stuff, but suddenly, if you make your product public (assuming it uses, e.g., TimescaleDB), things can get muddy. Everyone wants the flexibility to either open-source or commercialize a successful internal product in the future.

The problem is that, even if your app is not a mere frontend for TimescaleDB/Mongo/Redis, you can get sued, and you'll have to spend unnecessary time and money proving things in court. No one wants this, especially a startup owner whose money and time are tight. Also, even if your startup/company uses some of these techs, potential company buyers will be very wary of the purchase if they know they'll have to deal with this later.

I would assume TimescaleDb only sues if you money. In this case you can also afford a commercial license. If you hit big just contact them and tell there was a problem having a correct license earlier and you want to fix the situation.

There is 0% chance Timescale would sue mom’n’pop operation for breaking their license.

Your assumptions are based on good faith, and businesses are not run on that :) Imagine Oracle or IBM bought Timescale; that 0% chance suddenly increases dramatically.

The license doesn't allow you to "give access to, directly or indirectly (e.g., via a wrapper) to [SQL]".

Legally, what's a wrapper? Is a REST API a wrapper?

I imagine legally would need a lawsuit to set a precedence, and if a license owner sets an over-reaching precedence of what a wrapper is, they risk losing customer trust and companies avoiding them like the plague.

e.g. timescaledb going after a tsdb as a service company offering tsdb behind a graphql wrapper vs timescaledb going after a financial company offering timeseries data collection and viewing.

I think a good border test would be, would timescaledb allow you to offer a metrics and logging service? technically you're offering timeseries database functionality, but it's in a constrained domain, and very clearly a different product, but still effectively CRUDing timeseries data.

That’s the internal use restriction. There is also the restriction more relevant to the use cases I’m talking about on Value Added Products which is “the customer is prohibited, either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database objects”.

Which is, basically, saying that you can do anything that doesn’t give your customers the ability to redefine and modify the database schema as long as you are creating a product that is adding value on top of timescale. Is any of this 100% clear? Not any more that legalese generally is, and of course probably wise to talk to a lawyer if you’re concerned about it. Timescale has made their intent with the license clear in the past with blog posts and such though.

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