ScyllaDB – Why We're Moving to a Source Available License

By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I&#x27;m really not sure how I feel about it. I&#x27;m thankful for all the free stuff, and I can&#x27;t fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two.<p>I&#x27;m a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don&#x27;t feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can&#x27;t imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this move.<p>But still, it makes me distrust corporate &quot;open source&quot; more and more.

See this is tricky in my mind, because it doesn&#x27;t seem like this was just a move to stop AWS&#x2F;GCP cloud hosting Scylla. That was already solved with the AGPL license. This seems like they are just trying to stop any usage of ScyllaDB that isn&#x27;t paid (outside of a relatively small free tier). I suppose its not a big deal, since you can always migrate to cassandra for open source forever, but definitely unfortunate for any individuals&#x2F;organizations that can&#x27;t afford this upgrade.

In reality open source is very difficult to build a business around, which means that software can’t exist long term. It’s not about not wanting to be open source, it’s about realising that you and your employees livelihoods are being abused by people who see open source and take it to mean they shouldn’t pay. Especially egregious when your competitors take your work and build a closed sourced business around it.

All these mentions of the &quot;ScyllaDB Source Available License&quot; but not even a link towards the actual text.<p>I understand it will have limitations on the data that you can use (up to a certain size) and the CPU power (up to these many cores). Will it also limit the activity type (commercial, SaaS offering, ...)?

Yep. This becomes expected path - Corporate Open Source, eventually changes license to improve monetization. The way to avoid this is pick foundation based Open Source software which is not controlled by single Corporation like PostgreSQL, Linux or Kubernetes.<p>The other interesting example is Copyleft software, where &quot;Corporation&quot; does not have complete copyright holder. For example Percona or MariaDB can&#x27;t &quot;close source&quot; their MySQL forks of the core software, though it does not prevent them from doing it with other parts of the complete platform, think MariaDB MaxScale.

Ridiculous as ScyllaDB is just a C++ implementation of a real open source project, Cassandra.

Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seastar.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seastar.io</a> that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.

Open Source means knowledge dissemination.<p>If they did not get back from community it may mean that their code was bad for contributions.<p>Sorry!<p>They can keep the unmaintainable mess to themselves because then, the code is available but not really open.<p>License is one thing for openness, code quality is the other.

Posted few hours earlier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42453102">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42453102</a>

&quot;Because we like money.&quot;