Making your product available for free isn't a publicity stunt, it's a huge step for a business. And, in practice, it's not that much different for the average user if only the binaries are Apache licensed. When was the last time you needed to open up the Postgres source code and modify something?
If it wasn't a publicity stunt, it certainly had the effects of one: I've never heard of Datomic before and here they are at the top of hackernews!
> And, in practice, it's not that much different for the average user if only the binaries are Apache licensed. When was the last time you needed to open up the Postgres source code and modify something?
Sure, if you're playing a game it probably doesn't make a difference. If I'm building my IT infrastructure on a product, tt makes a huge difference if I get a an open-source-licensed "binary" or access the to source:
- the package they distribute contains no less than 960 different jars. Most of those are the standard apache-project-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-style dependencies. Say I'd like to update log4j because it contains a catastropic vulnerability that datomic decide not to fix. (not that that sort of thing ever happens)
- or say Datomic decides to abandon the product altogether or goes out of business
- or say I'm not happy with their quality of service contract around their DB they support and would like to work with a different company
Rich Hickey started Datatomic (along with Stuart Halloway & Justin Gehtland). He also created the Clojure programming language and has been on Hacker News numerous times with many popular talks. In fact they all have made famous contributions.
Many businesses use Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle and don't need access to the source. I'm not saying open source isn't nice, but it is absolutely not a requirement for IT infrastructure.
I'd imagine people rely on many cloud services that are in fact, not open source.
Again, with your hypotheticals—when was the last time you needed to do any of that with Postgres or another FOSS DBMS?
For the vast majority of use cases, a FOSS DBMS and a free-as-in-beer DBMS are indistinguishable. If you're in a category where they're not, then don't use Datomic, but this is still far more than a publicity stunt.
We must be working in a different world. In all my career I've not once worked with a serious business that did not have a support contract for their database system open source or not.
Most of those had escrow agreements for central closed source components with vendors in case the vendor went out of business. (obviously only for things perceived as critical and from companies with some perceived risk of failure).
And god knows how many times have I experienced companies biting themselves because they bought into a product that turned out not to deliver what was promised after the contracts were signed.
Free beer binaries are not mutually exclusive of Enterprise support agreements featuring all those things you mentioned above _for people that need that_.
Completely agree. I'm fine with a free beer license. The context of the post is that the binary is licensed using an Open Source license which leads to confusion.
Never. On the other hand, I have considerable confidence that I could do so, and that if something goes wrong with upstream development, someone is likely to do so.
If I use a free-binary-but-no-source product, I’m much more likely to get stuck.
(Of course, as a regretful MySQL user, I am pretty stuck, but largely because MySQL is, in many respects, a terrible product. It does, quite reliably, get security updates at the kind of general maintenance that keeps it working no worse than it ever did.)
Today I looked up pgvector's NixOS availability. For the past 15 years I have relied on postgis source being available and improved by the community for my day to day business.
My point is that the option to modify the source results in software bein available and community maintained in a way that binary only isn't. Even if I change the source myself just twice a decade.
