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Comment by 3np

2 years ago

Yeah, so, if maintainers started blocking external contributions for business reasons or changed the license of the upstream repo, that would be a legitimate concern.

If this blog post raises any legitimate concerns, I missed them. All I see is entitlement to continue get work for free. If you're concerned about gaps in ClickHouse functionality, maybe pick up the slack and contribute back?

It takes a village to raise a database, as the saying goes.

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3np

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ethbr1  2 years ago

Ignoring any arguments to the author/company, the big question is "What does ClickHouse do, if there's a PR from the community reimplementing a cloud-only/closed feature?"

The problem with open core is there's no great answer.

Either it's merged, in which case there are now two codebases implementing the same feature (one open, one closed), and the company's revenue stream is imperiled.

Or it's rejected (either explicitly or quietly ignored), in which case work is wasted and the project is less useful than it could be.

How did open core companies historically handle this?

As ugly as it is, it feels like permissive OSS (e.g. MIT) core + open but anti-SaaS non-OSS cloud-only/closed feature is a more sustainable model that encourages development in the open.

E.g. an MIT-alike license for select features that says "free-as-in-beer license up to X users, otherwise talk to our sales team and get a commercial license"

At the end of the day, I want OSS to succeed and be great, but especially nowadays that takes a large team, which takes funding, which requires a competitive revenue model.

sylvinus  2 years ago

AFAIK, the author is indeed trying to contribute back, that is the whole point: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/54644