SAD_FACE Posts
I've been trying to get a quote for a self-managed ArangoDB Enterprise license. I don't understand how there isn't a price. Like, you buy something, and then you use it. I've sent 2 emails through their contact form, almost 2 weeks apart. I've attempted 2 times to get a quote through their chat. There's apparently no price? It's almost like they are charging whatever they think they can get out of a client. The "person" I talked to in the chat said they'd email me the "starting price". Such a great database, this is breaking my heart.
I was working on one of my several ArangoDB projects and I noticed the version in the Web UI said 3.10, but remembered recently seeing an announcement for 3.12. I started looking into it and found this blog post. According to that post, ArangoDB source code has replace the Apache 2.0 license with the BSL v1.1 license. This is applied to the BSL license:
ArangoDB has defined our Additional Use Grant to allow BSL-licensed ArangoDB source code to be deployed for any purpose (e.g. production) as long as you are not (i) creating a commercial derivative work or (ii) offering or including it in a commercial product, application, or service (e.g. commercial DBaaS, SaaS, Embedded or Packaged Distribution/OEM). We have set the Change Date to four (4) years, and the Change License to Apache 2.0.
Basically, if you are using the source code, you have to use as-is and not build it into a product, including using it with as part of a service. What I have been working on is pretty much providing an interface to use it as a service, but I don't use the source code. The wording and definitions aren't very clear either, does including it in an application include a web site?
The Community version has adopted a Community License:
We are also making changes to our Community Edition with the prepackaged ArangoDB binaries available for free on our website. Where before this edition was governed by the same Apache 2.0 license as the source code, it will now be governed by a new ArangoDB Community License, which limits the use of community edition for commercial purposes to a 100GB limit on dataset size in production within a single cluster and a maximum of three clusters.
This is at least clearer and would apply to my projects. I don't know if anything I do will get above 100gb, I'd maybe like it to, but I don't know. The Enterprise license didn't change. On top of all of this, ArangoDB's pricing is not very clear, like it doesn't tell me what it would cost to do x with their cloud product, it just shows per hour pricing. There's no pricing for their Enterprise on-premise available without contacting them. I'm beginning to not trust it.
I've spent probably 100s of hours working with, learning, and building with ArangoDB. I've helped people set up migration tools and deployments. I've consulting people on migrations from other databases to ArangoDB. I've written a lot of AQL, a lot. I've been an evangelist, basically. I wish I had seen the previous announcements about the license change. I suspect it won't be included in openSUSE beyond 3.10, because it no longer uses an OSI license. I suspect I'll at least look for another option, we'll see where it goes beyond that.