alt Hacker NewsBuilding non-open extensions on top of it, it's not the license I don't like, the bad taste is that they use something open extend it and keep part of it closed.
The license allows it but on the flip side it's vendor lock-in predicated on using something open as the base.
Fully proprietary no issue with that, full open, no issue with that, building proprietary on top of open is where the bad taste comes in.
For completeness, it's not them specifically either, the other cloud companies do similar things and I suspect in part the reason they don't open these extensions up is because the others will but then they are doing the same thing themselves.
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When one develops using open-source software they have an obligation to follow the licenses. They also have a moral obligation to be respectful of the work upon which they’re building. And they have a social obligation to help improve that software where they can.
Those that develop on top of open-source have no obligation to give you their work for free.
You’d be surprised as to the amount of open-source contributions TIN drove towards Postgres, LLVM, and pgrx. And you’d be speechless at the amount of upstream work across all sorts of open-source PlanetScale does. Postgres 18.6, for example, is better for you today, in part, because of TIN. You’re welcome.
I find this attitude self-defeating because the lure of being able to provide some amount of proprietary software on top of open is what draws in the corporate investment in open software. And in the system we live in, it’s hard to imagine there’d be nearly as much open software as there is without that corporate investment. As a big fan of open software, this seems like a great trade to me.
(Disclosure: I work for a company with this business model, in part because I like working on open software)