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Comment by aseipp | Hacker News Reader

Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on":

> We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.

So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring.

Congrats to the team, in any case!

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"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?"

They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hopes that the community picks up the tab.

I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse.

By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock solid product. - https://vector.dev/

They bought Vector - it was always opensource

Vector was already OSS when they acquired the company that created it, timber.

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-techn...

And yet they did dedicate some resources on it, until now. Which basically is my point :)

Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace, which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.

But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours to it.

To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.

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