Comment by valyala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by valyala | Hacker News Reader

VictoriaMetrics CTO here.

I don't understand why pure open-source license such as Apache2, MIT or BSD should be replaced with some source available license in order to increase profits from enterprise support contracts:

- The license change won't force cloud companies signing the enterprise agreement with you in most cases. If they didn't want paying you before the license change, why they will change their mind after the licence change? It is better from costs and freedom perspective forking open-source version of your product and using it for free like Amazon did with Elasticsearch.

- The license change leads to user base fragmentation - some of your users switch to forks run by cloud companies. Others start searching for alternative open-source products. So, you start losing users and market share after the license change.

- The license change doesn't bring you new beefy enterprise contracts, since it doesn't include any incentives for your users to sign such contracts.

That's why we at VictoriaMetrics aren't going to change the Apache2 license for our products. Our main goal is to provide good products to users, and to help users use these products in the most efficient way. https://docs.victoriametrics.com/goals/

What if AWS launches AWS Metrics which just takes your code and hosts it.

You can't out compete Amazon here. I vastly prefer to use MIT or Apache code for my projects. It just makes things easier, but I also respect companies like yours have a right to seek a profit.

If Amazon will make a product on top of open-source VictoriaMetrics, then we'll say thanks to Amazon, since this is great marketing - more people will be aware of great products provided by VictoriaMetrics!

There is close to zero probability that Amazon will pay us for this product, so there is no any sense in changing the license from Apache2 to some BSL-like license, since they never sign long-term contracts with open-source product vendors.

But if I could just go to Amazon directly,presumably they'd offer support, how do I give you money.

I just don't understand how for-profit company can develop true open source software. You can have a non profit foundation and a for profit support studio. Godot effectively does this.

Plus if you've taken VC money you can always get voted out in a few years. Or just have a nice exit. I wouldn't be mad at anyone for taking a large payday and retiring. But then the for profit company is free to change the license.

It feels more straightforward to use a proprietary or copy left license from the start. Your company exists to make money, and I think most of us can respect that. We just don't want to start building our projects off of open source software, that converts to some other license years down the road.

If you go to Amazon directly, this is great - you continue using our products and recommending them to your friends. Probably, next time you'll become our customer. For example, if you aren't satisfied with the support from Amazon, or there are some missing features at Amazon, or if you just switch department or company.

We develop open source products, we are profitable and we have good revenue growth rate. We make money mostly on high-quality enterprise technical support for our open-source products. Some of our products have enterprise-only features [1], but most of our paid customers continue using open-source versions of VictoriaMetrics products.

[1] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/enterprise/

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

If I ever have a need for a metrics solution I'll consider your products.

Not everyone is able to or wants to use other peoples' computers.

I hope you can appreciate that the problem here is that the proposition that you "aren't going to change" is entirely unfalsifiable, reliant on trust, and that the individuals making the proposition are in a position to enforce it ad infinitum.

Consider me skeptical.

I tried providing good reasons why changing the license from truly open source to some source-available license has little sense from business perspective. Of course, something may change in the future, which could force us reconsider the decision on sticking with Apache2 license. But currently I don't see any reasons to change the license. And I'm sure there will no be such reasons in the next 10 years.

P.S. IMHO, the main reason to change the license at CocroachDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, TimescaleDB, Grafana and other products is weak revenue growth rate. Shareholders falsely think that the license change may help increasing the revenue growth rate, but I don't understand why...

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