The core-enterprise dichotomy seems more or less the same as what scylla had until recently. Does influxdata have different considerations from scylla that will allow influxdb to remain open source in the long term?
The commercial offering is the historical time series DB along with a bunch of other features around high availability, read replication, fine grained security, and the compaction engine which enables longer range queries and row level deletes.
I think Scylla had most of their DB in the open and then a small slice of Enterprise functionality (although I'm not super familiar with their product line).
Ideally, we'd have many open source users and even our commercial customers would use the open source in addition to the commercial offering.
But ultimately, it's about finding a sustainable business model that keeps more software coming. We have a preference for permissive open source over source available. In my view, we may as well create freemium rather than source available.
With this version of InfluxDB, we've been able to invest heavily into Apache projects that lie at the core of it: Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, and the object store crate, which we developed and donated to the ASF.
We'd like to continue that work because we think that a highly performant, modular, vectorized query engine (i.e. DataFusion) should be a free commodity that's widely available and widely contributed to.