I think this is an important point, and I know it often derided as people asking a company to give something away for free, so I want to defend it.
I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the console could use a few usability improvements that an interested OSS developer could add, but that don't happen. It's frustrating that the Client wire protocol hasn't been released yet, so support for non-JVM languages (which are provided by the community and do not have official Cognitect support) are stuck using the deprecated and unsupported REST interface.
I am not ideologically against proprietary software, I just think Datomic would be orders of magnitude more useful with an active OSS ecosystem around it.
Well, why would they? Clones would be using relatively old technology. The current bleeding-edge research here is on more-structured, more-formal knowledge representation, stuff like FQL/AQL [0] which is open-source from the first day. Maybe Datomic's not sufficiently better than Pg or SQLite to motivate anybody.
Rich Hickey has responded to this many times. They made Clojure free and open source and have put lots of their own $$ into Clojure. If they want to make a product that costs money, that is their choice. They also need to keep the lights on. Now if they won't let users who pay for the product see source-code under an NDA, that is a indeed a problem in my mind, but is pretty much just standard business practice. I have no clue if they're open in that area or not.
I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the console could use a few usability improvements that an interested OSS developer could add, but that don't happen. It's frustrating that the Client wire protocol hasn't been released yet, so support for non-JVM languages (which are provided by the community and do not have official Cognitect support) are stuck using the deprecated and unsupported REST interface.
I am not ideologically against proprietary software, I just think Datomic would be orders of magnitude more useful with an active OSS ecosystem around it.