ScyllaDB moving to a source available license | Hacker News Reader

ScyllaDB moving to a source available license

scylladb.com

14 pointstwoodfin10 comments

Of course it is. All those open source copycat projects, using open source to get exposure then switching. Boo. Just like cockroachdb. Taking Open source contributions for free then making it spyware or payware.

Bleh

I would say it's opposite. No one contributes to open source and the developers have to make money on the side to work on the project (i.e., do consulting/tech support/etc). Or more often companies with money come to fork an open source project from the developer, and continue pretending it's their own now.

> I would say it's opposite. No one contributes to open source and the developers have to make money on the side to work on the project

You missed the important part of his sentence:

> All those open source copycat projects, using open source to get exposure then switching

The original open source here was Cassandra. Scylla exists to pick off that market share. They launch with a free license, pull customers, then swap license. The actual adoption of Scylla would have been a fraction had it been released under this license to start, which everyone understands.

> Or more often companies with money come to fork an open source project from the developer, and continue pretending it's their own now

It had already been AGPL, so it's not like they're protecting against competition. They already had a license that avoided the forking problem. This isn't protection against AWS (keyspaces likely has more OSS cassandra code in the protocol tier than it has Scylla code, if it has either). It's protection against free consumption.

Copycat is a bit of a stretch here imho, considering it's in different language, and even the general architecture. But I agree they are very compatible on the protocol level, which they used as an advantage as people don't need to rewrite their code when they migrate.

> Copycat is a bit of a stretch here imho, considering it's in different language, and even the general architecture. But I agree they are very compatible on the protocol level, which they used as an advantage as people don't need to rewrite their code when they migrate

It's not a stretch. They literally copied the java code and re-implemented it class-by-class with Seastar/c++.

It's literally in the ORIGIN file in their repo: https://github.com/scylladb/scylladb/blob/dc375b8cd3e8c7e85d...

Yes, I understand they looked at the source and re-implemented a bunch of it when they started 10 years ago. But in the result it's a very different code. I mean, it's 45K commits so I believe they implemented things by themselves in majority of those commits. I guess we just have different understanding of the copycat term.

Youre not far off, just use your original sentence and acknowledge that Scylla isn’t the OSS here, its the company that came in, forked a volunteer driven project, and tried to pretend its theirs:

> Or more often companies with money come to fork an open source project from the developer, and continue pretending it's their own now.

I like Scylla and we use it, so I wish them well. But what I don't understand with this announcement is how it supposed to work if they don't publish the pricing model. Just "contact us to get a quote". How people are supposed to make advance plans without clear pricing?

Hmm, which license are they switching to?

positioning themselves to sell

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