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by simonw 1145 days ago
I find that answer confusing. I don't think I've ever seen binaries being licensed under Apache 2 without the relevant source code before.
3 comments

It gives the licensee the ability to distribute the binary, use or include it in their products in the same way as an open-source product. It just merely prevents modification without decompiling (which i assume is not easy given it's clojure, not to mention obfuscation?). And presumably it makes it less likely someone would just produce a competing product if they should choose to re-monetize it?
Why would it prevent modification or decompiling?
Only due to difficulty, not by license.
Yeah, it's a complete bullshit move. Mongoose OS (an embedded iot Plattform not the db) does something similar. It's extremely weasely and doesn't instill trust at all.
Trust is not the same for everyone. One model of trust is: A trusts B to do C.

Nubank is releasing the binary permissively. You might want more, but this is not a breach of trust.

Datomic has been around for more than 10 years, so there is ample data to base expectations.

I saw Fabrice Bellard do it this year (MIT): The CPU version is released as binary code under the MIT license. The GPU version is commercial software. Please contact fabrice at bellard dot org for the exact terms.

https://bellard.org/ts_server/