alt Hacker NewsA client introduced me to Arangodb which I felt was a "secret weapon" that I used for a lot of side projects. Then this came out
https://arango.ai/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ADB-Community-L...
and it is dead to me. I want my head! I can accept GPL, Apache, MIT or some legit open source license. For my projects I see two possible paths which I want to have open: (1) building a commercial service on top of a database (like my RSS reader) where you can't necessarily draw a clear line between what is allowed and what is not allowed, for instance I have an adaptation layer that makes postgres look like the part of arangodb that I actually use (I do manually rewrite AQL queries into a DSL that extends AlchemyAPI) and if I did something similar over arango is this reselling? (2) an open source project where I want to tell people "go forth and use this code" and not have to hire a lawyer to know what they can and can't do.
Once a vendor has shown they have this attitude, I expect them to change their license for the worse in the future -- I just don't want to invest my time and energy in their platform.
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This is why I think sites like this one should show license information and make it simple to filter by OSS license.
Otherwise it's the same trap, just one level deeper.
The license you linked was too much for me because it included limitations 100 GB of data and providing audit logs for the company to inspect.
But I don’t have a problem with people inserting clauses to prevent Amazon from taking over. I don’t expect free work from people forever. If I’m going to use an open source project to build a commercial product, I would only do so if I’m ok forking and maintaining the project myself if necessary.