And that is why HN is my favorite part of the net for about a decade now :)

Thanks for the clarification, glad to hear it is allowed.

It seems to me, herein lies the rub. No whether they can call it open source or not. I am sympathetic to Timescale's situation. (I also love their work) But the big problem IMO is this incredibly hard to judge language about "value-added products or services"

It doesn't really matter what is opined outside of the agreement, and from this conversation, it doesn't seem crystal clear one way or another whether Gitlab's use would be considered value-added or not.

So, do you want to be a developer, project-manager, CTO, or CEO who has to determine if your use of TimescaleDB is considered value-added or not?

Also keep in mind, that to really make this determination requires a court case around the specifics of your usage and situation.

And what if they get a SCO Unix style CEO someday?

I hope we can find a better way as developers and technologists to express whether you can use software like this without vague promises that you won't be litigated, or your use case is probably not in violation of the license.

Hi @camkego We tried pretty hard to define a pretty specific definition of "Value Added Service" for TimescaleDB, which is why the license also has some "custom" aspects rather than just having a general clause about "can't be competitive" with us. So the definition is here, and an example of walking through a "test":

https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-...

    3.10 "Value Added Products or Services" means products or services developed by or for You that utilize (for example, as a back-end function or part of a software stack) all or parts of the Timescale Software to provide time-series database storage and operations in support of larger value-added products or services (for example, an IoT platform or vertical-specific application) with respect to which all of the following are true:

    (i) such value-added products or services are not primarily database storage or operations products or services;

    (ii) such value-added products or services add substantial value of a different nature to the time-series database storage and operations afforded by the Timescale Software and are the key functions upon which such products or services are offered and marketed; and

    (iii) users of such Value Added Products or Services are prohibited, either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database objects, such as through use of the Timescale Data Definition Interfaces, in a Timescale Database utilized by such Value Added Products or Services.

So for the GitLab monitoring service, given my understand from the short description:

1. Is the service other than primarily a database storage service? [Yes]

2. Does it offer substantial value over a database and is it offered/marketed for a key function other than a database? [Yes, it is a monitoring system, not a database system]

3. Are users of the monitoring system prevented from defining schema and accessing database DDL? [Yes]

Of course, we _very much_ welcome feedback how to make it clearer or more explicit. Our goal is _not_ to create uncertainty.