[phamilton]

With an AGPL license, does that make it unlikely to be included in hosted environments like RDS?

My understanding of the spirit of the license is that it should be fine as long as modifications are made available. Anyone know of any existing extensions in RDS that are AGPL?

[allan_s]

Related question, could it be possible that at some point postgresql natively implements that algorithm ? Or as there is already an extension doing it , regardless of the licence , it is unlikely that patches in that direction will be accepted ?

[j45]

Running it for your own purposes as part of a solution that includes search should be fine under AGPL.

If your product is elastic search built into Postgres as a repackaged and direct competitor to this search plug-in, that’s where my understanding is over the line.

[allan_s]

yes I understand I can do that, and I also understand why the authors chose to do that, I would have done the same.

My point of view is more from a small saas company perspective (i.e 100% pragmatic):

1. I want as less vendor as possible, especially on something as mission critical as my database 2. I already use AWS RDS and it comes with a LOT of nice things (managed, multi-az, easy backup/restore story, etc.)

In that situation:

1. hosting myself is not an option because I will loose all the niceties that I will have to reimplement 2. buying from a 3rd party is not an option either because: 1. What if they go bankrupt ? 2. We are ISO 27001 and they may be not ISO 27001 themselves or forever. 3. If I choose a vendor because it's "postgres + feature A" then if there's an other vendor selling "postgres + feature B" (timescaledb etc.) what do I do ?

That's why I was more interested in knowing if that specific could one day be implemented in postgres directly (as there's already tsvector).

Once again I'm 100% behind them to have chosen a restrictive license if they plan on selling it, but in that case their interested and mine are not aligned, and that's fine.

[j45]

That's a really fair use case acknlowedging personal preference to interpret how you like it.

I find some of the built in services on clouds are just open source libraries that are packaged up to increase tie in to that platform.

I like cloud, but cloud agnostically, and hybrid/private clouds in the mix with that seem like a good skill to at least be able to consider thinking through.

[philippemnoel]

ParadeDB author here -- correct! We plan to offer a hosted version soon and the idea behind picking AGPL is to be as permissive as possible so that people can use the product for free, but also protect ourselves from abuse in case a large company, say AWS, were to want to ship it in their own environment.

In fact, we went through much questioning wondering to go with ELv2, Apache, AGPL, etc. before settling on AGPL

[j45]

Appreciate the response! This would be a great blog post btw.

[adobrawy]

See who made pg_bm25 - vendor of database based on PostgreSQL. Most likely they would like offer that as hosted solution itself, so they attempt avoid Elasticsearch / Terraform-like drama using AGPL license from beginning.

[klysm]

I forget, does AWS let you use custom extensions from pgrx?

[adobrawy]

No, they allow use Rust for custom functions (alternatively to PL/SQL) only.