Thanks for sharing this point of view. For those interested, I wanted to share this blog post that explains the Timescale approach in detail. https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business...

Timescale's community manager.

Your case in point dropped off, but Percona (MySQL and MongoDB distributions) and until a couple of years ago MariaDB fell into this category I think.

Was going to mention MongoDB. the day they announced the change, I created a fork (https://github.com/danx0r/mongo). Now, if a client wants mongoDB I just install this version on a cpu somewhere and go from there. If the project really needs more up-to-date versions of the core DB or the cloud tools, we have a discussion about the restrictions that apply to later versions.

I think this does not really constitute pump-and-dump or loss-leader behavior because the code generated during the open license phase has real value to the community.

One thing I think could use more analysis is, does Mongo's license change breach any copyleft provisions of the original license? I recall they started with the permissive Apache license but prior to the last change 4 years ago they were AGPL.

What happened a couple of years ago with MariaDB?

That was a bad explanation on my part, sorry. They are still open source! But they diverged from keeping fully aligned with MySQL developments AFAIK so are no longer a fork/distribution as they are forging their own path.

So I was being unclear, the "until a couple of years ago" was referring to divergence rather than a change in license.

Thanks for the reply. I followed this quite closely at the time, but not for the last few years. Glad to hear they're still open. Features will get us all in the end, eh? :)

folks like to chat about benchmarks

Timescale doesn't charge for any of its software. Revenue comes from providing hosting services that are optimized towards TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL at scale.

The code is source-available, license philosophy is explained in this blog post https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business...

That includes the HA implementation, and I think someone else shared the docs for that. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the mentions (and for using TimescaleDB).

If anyone's curious about TimescaleDB, it's packaged as an extension to Postgres, optimizing for performance, storage, and analysis of time series data. Implementing columnar compression algorithms is a big part of the secret sauce that makes TimescaleDB a popular choice with Postgres and SQL developers. You can read more about that on the Timescale blog (I'm Timescale's community manager btw). https://www.timescale.com/blog/search/?query=compression

If anyone's curious, the youtube channel may be a good place to start, especially this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsceB9ac9MHTtM1XWONMR...

Have to say I love this use case of TimescaleDB and Grafana – a perfect example of time series data used for something small and useful to prove a theory. In case anyone's tantalized the TimescaleDB YouTube channel has some great free how-to videos on setting up TimescaleDB and Grafana.

TimescaleDB is packaged as a postgres extension, there's a GitHub project here if anyone is interested to check in on that https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

Hello would like to check in on this with you. You can find my email address in my profile, I am Timescale's community manager. Thanks!

Timescale is hiring for a Software Engineer (Database Internals) and this could also be a senior-level hire. It's based on PostgreSQL but if the rest of the resume stacks up it's not 100% essential that you've worked on PostgreSQL internals before. Global, remote.

> It's based on PostgreSQL but if the rest of the resume stacks up it's not 100% essential that you've worked on PostgreSQL internals before

What would be an ideal resume for someone who never worked on Postgres

This article discusses how TimescaleDB (packaged as an extension to PostgreSQL) approaches performance improvements, though it's a bit of an old piece and things have moved on with TimescaleDB too. It gives some good insights though. https://www.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-vs-6a696248104e/ There are some more recent articles on the blog about performance and benchmarks if you're tantalized by that one.

Transparency: I work for Timescale