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cognitiveinlineyesterday at 1:47 PM5 repliesview on HN

pgrust seems to have good momentum. AGPL is an odd license for a non web project. Postgres is MIT-like, and that drove it's adoption.

Have pgrust folks reconsidered this? Else, IMO we can have an independant rust port of pgrust, which can be MIT, which will garner more attention.


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malisperyesterday at 3:27 PM

Author here. At least for databases, AGPL (or stricter) has become standard. The issue is it's so easy for megacorps (Amazon, Google, etc) to take a permissively licensed product and monetize it at the expense of the original standard.

For instance, Mongo, Cockroach, and Materialize have all gone source available. We picked AGPL because it's the best balance between open source and prevents Amazon from just repackaging it and selling it.

If AGPL is an issue for anyone, we would be happy to dual-license under a commercial license.

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appplicationyesterday at 2:44 PM

Oh bummer. I was really excited about pgrust but AGPL is a dealbreaker. Not for me personally, but it will never see wide adoption because it’s a banned license in most corporate environments. Lack of path to wide adoption means it’s dead in the water.

It’s weird because those who actually care about optimized pg gains are most likely large corporate customers. Why make a product targeting them and license it in such a way they’ll never use it?

This also hard blocks upstreaming any beneficial features into core Postgres.

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wrsyesterday at 5:59 PM

Good news, we now know up front what an independent port would cost, and it’s not much. So no reason AWS, Google, and friends couldn’t bang out their own port if they want, binary-compatible with this one.

What we don’t know for sure is whether there is any copyright for LLM-generated code. The license might be irrelevant!

ognarbyesterday at 1:50 PM

2 commits in the repo both generated by claude. This is AI slop, I wonder where you see good momentum?

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busterarmyesterday at 2:38 PM

Everything around Rust is political, so the license choices are also about political statement.

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