9 ms·

DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

109 points by arjunnarayan 4y ago

andrenotgiant 4y ago
Has either the Dewitt clause or the Dewitt Embrace ever resulted in some kind of legal action? It seems like more of a threat stance to various partners and ecosystem players than anything else.
- igorlukanin 4y ago
  I think someone from Oracle would be more informed on that matter. JK. On a more serious note, who would dare to displease a multibillion corp with hundreds of lawyers (without being backed by a similar co & lawyers)?
  - rckoepke 4y ago
    Could you pirate the database, then hide behind the fifth amendment to not reveal that you're a pirate while simultaneously asserting that you never agreed to any EULA? I'm not sure what the legal rights are here. I'm certain someone in say, China or Russia, could pirate the database and run benchmarks on it with no repercussions. Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas technology analyst firm.
    - xen0 4y ago
      > Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas technology analyst firm. How much are you willing to pay for a legally dubious benchmark?
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        Does anyone ever pay for benchmarks? Or are they web content used to lure in new contracts?
    - eastbound 4y ago
      The Fifth only protects the innocents. It’s a fun twist of this amendment - if you are guilty you do not have a right to keep silent.
      - Xelbair 4y ago
        and in any sane legal system you are innocent until proven guilty.
      - jkaplowitz 4y ago
        That's true if you've been convicted and sentenced for the crime regarding which your testimony would self-incriminate, but not otherwise. Someone who has committed the crime but hasn't yet been convicted and sentenced still falls under its protection, assuming there isn't a grant of immunity from prosecution to force the testimony anyway.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        Other way around, sadly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States Convicted felons are exempt from the portion of the National Firearms Act that requires that machine guns (and other NFA items like short barreled shotguns) be registered as it would violate their 5th Amendment rights.
        donatj 4y ago
        Huh, that is one of the most interesting supreme court decisions I think I've read. I kind of agree with it in a text-of-the-law sense. I would be very curious to see that logic hold up in court these days. They got Al Capone on tax evasion for instance, but wouldn't paying his taxes on ill-got funds have been incriminating?
    - mindslight 4y ago
      It's much simpler than that. Person A installs database on a shared or to-be-sold computer, requires a license for the installation process to make a copy, "agrees" to EULA. Person B then runs benchmarks on said computer, which does not require a license because no copy is being made, and publishes the results. The only flaw in this is that Oracle will send its mafia enforcers to break your kneecaps despite not having a valid legal case. So you'll lose even if you technically can win.
  - _lqaf 4y ago
    These things become substantially easier when approached correctly. In this case, never run Oracle software. Not only will it vastly improve your mood during budget season; your developers will be less likely to stab you in your sleep and you will never worry about their primary line of business: lawsuits. And you don't care how they benchmark.
    - eastbound 4y ago
      Here the Jal clause is born: You are now allowed to speak about what Oracle’s main line of business is.
- bluestreak 4y ago
  It does result in cease and desist threats quite often. We have been on the receiving end of one.
  - igorlukanin 4y ago
    Oh! Would love to learn more :—) As I'm the author of the blog post in question, I can think of including your account there, if you'd like to.
GorillaWarfare 4y ago
Could this article comparing DeWitt Clauses be considered benchmarking?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- igorlukanin 4y ago
  Or benchmarketing?
- jkaplowitz 4y ago
  No, it's just an analysis of the licenses, not of the software itself.
Nextgrid 4y ago
If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?
- noasaservice 4y ago
  Its mainly related to MSSQL and Horracle. Horracle will just use their legal team (which is bigger than their engineers and developers) to bludgeon you over benchmarks.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    "This just in Oracle legal team takes down entire Tor Network" Jokes aside, I'm surprised they're so touchy about these things. They can make plenty of money without it, they can also save plenty of money with less lawyers.
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      If rationality was always used we wouldn't have had Putin making a gigantic, catastrophic geopolitical mistake. A little common sense goes an awful long way, but only if you choose to use it. MSSQL is destroying its own market by its pricing (and the licensing thicket, jesus christ, I've been looking at them for 2 days now and... shudder)
      - giancarlostoro 4y ago
        Used to just use PostgresSQL on Azure just fine. I am really surprised people use MSSQL or Oracle today honestly. You really don't need to tie yourself down to a proprietary DB anymore.
- igorlukanin 4y ago
  How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark published by a noname researcher seriously?
chmod775 4y ago
It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?
- fragmede 4y ago
  Oracle Virtualbox is pretty good, and free for personal use. They also make patches available for their Oracle Linux kernel - the UEK, and in a better format than RedHat.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    They are aggressive about the "personal use" thing. I used to work for an ISP. Apparently our customers would download Virtualbox, Oracle would pull the IPs out of their logs, find us, and then email us and ask us to buy a license. (More threatening than asking nicely, IIRC.) We informed them that we're an ISP and those IP addresses are our customers', not our office. And no, we didn't give them the contact information of our customers. I wonder how many of their sales reps have gone after Spectrum and Comcast since the whole work from home thing started.
- native_samples 4y ago
  They've done a lot of good stuff with Java.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- josephcsible 4y ago
  If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.
jenny91 4y ago
All the BSL/SSPL ones shouldn't be in an "open source" section. Just change the heading to "source available" or put them with the "vendors".
- igorlukanin 4y ago
  Author of the blog post in question here. Let me clarify: they shouldn't be there because they're not OSI-approved, right? Just wanna get your point here. (While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes of this post.)
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Not just lack of OSI approval, they're attempting to redefine the long accepted meaning of open source to include their new licenses. They want the goodwill of being "open source" without the obligations. The only sorts of licenses that have consistently been considered open source are either copyleft licenses like the GPL and do whatever the hell you want licenses like MIT and Apache. Do whatever you want... unless you're a big corporation... or unless you're part of a group the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical... etc. is a massive departure from the spirit of the term open source.
    - l33t2328 4y ago
      > unless you're part of a group the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical. What parts of the license mention that?
      - barkingcat 4y ago
        It is most likely in the "Additional Use Grant" which is tricky - because this additional use grant is distinct to each product licensed under the BSL. This additional use grant is also not that easy to find, since some licenses display it prominently, and others hide it under some additional legal fineprint[1,2]. From mariadb site: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#limits https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#limits "Q: What are the usage limitations under BSL? A: The usage is limited to non-production use, or production use within the limits of the “Additional Use Grant” defined by the vendor using BSL and specific to each BSL product." [1] obvious Additional Use Grant for Couchbase, included clearly in https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/ https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/ [2] it is extremely difficult to find the Additional Use Grant for Mariadb products themselves. For MaxScale, which is their proxy product, it is buried in a file within the source code (which on the surface level might be a good place for it, but it's not very easy to find and I had to go through lots of legal print to get to it) : https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LICENSE25.TXT https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LIC... or https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LICENSE6.TXT https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LIC... depending on which version you are trying to use, etc.
tetha 4y ago
Interesting. As a SaaS vendor, we do not allow performance testing of the production system. Because, you know, just casually saturating production resources can become very iffy for strange and unexpected reasons. And you will always be able to saturate a system, or a subsystem of the subsystem of the system. However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing to pay for it, with performance testing environments. We have, however, usually survived into the curiosity phase - "just how much to I have to throw at this thing to break it?".
- josephcsible 4y ago
  There's a really big difference between "don't performance test on our hardware that you're sharing with other tenants" and "don't performance test on our software no matter whose hardware it's running on".
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Looking at the language, almost all of them allow you to run benchmarks since it's phrased as "you may not publish benchmark results"; it doesn't forbid to actually run them. Never mind that MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. are not SaaS vendors of course. To be honest, if a cloud vendor has technical problems with someone running a few benchmarks then that would make me very wary of said cloud vendor. What's the difference between a "benchmark" and "using all resources I paid for" anyway?
  - danielheath 4y ago
    For a smaller/younger SAAS: If a customer environment is suddenly running at 100% of some resource when it wasn’t before, that’s an important thing to alert on / investigate. For established players it’s lost in the noise, but if it were me I’d appreciate a heads up for big changes.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Sure, a heads-up is certainly nice, but I don't think that running a (reasonable) set of benchmarks is all that out of the ordinary, or any different from just taxing the service at 100% with some periodic batch job or the like. Paying for it is even stranger IMO. And for what it's worth, I did actually work for a few small SaaS businesses, but a few reasonable benchmarks wouldn't have been a problem. Of course, if your benchmarks are going to take 50 hours it's a different story. Also: I suspect a lot of these database SaaS services are a lot smaller than you'd might think. I know at least one of them is anyway because I worked there (and there's no DeWitt Clause).
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dwohnitmok 4y ago
One of my personal bugbears is the DeWitt Clause for Datomic, especially because knowing the performance profile of Datomic is very important for understanding whether your app will be a good fit for it given some of its peculiarities.
- casion 4y ago
  You're free to benchmark it yourself and not publish the results. The performance of it depends heavily on a variety of factors which may it or may not apply to you. Like a lot of software, the devil is in the details.
kstrauser 4y ago
Honestly, the presence of that clause screams to me "this app sucks and we'll sue you if you tell anyone how badly". That may not be the case whatsoever, but my first assumption is that they're trying to hide terrible performance.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  While I would prefer if this clause was not a thing, I also understand why it exists even for great products. It is surprisingly difficult to reproduce many workload benchmarks and quite easy to engineer a benchmark that misrepresents real-world database performance. There are tools that exist to generate optimally pathological workloads that target specific database implementations, while looking completely reasonable and innocuous. It doesn't even need to be a bad faith benchmark by a competitor, there is a high probability that the person configuring the environment does not know how to do it correctly and/or optimally. The DeWitt Clause is a defense against the unfortunate pervasiveness of incompetent and/or bad faith benchmarking. Companies have a well-founded reason to not trust third parties to do a good job of representing the performance of their product.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    I understand your point, and that’s a reasonable argument. I do disagree with it, though. Imagine a hypothetical FooDB by Bar, Inc. If Bar never put that clause in the FooDB license, then I think you’re absolutely right. People would come up with some awful-looking benchmarks that made it look bad. However, what a golden opportunity for Bar! They could step up with some free or steeply discounted consulting to help the benchmarker fix the problem and publish new, good results. They wouldn’t have to do that too many times for word to get around on sites like this: FooDB is nice and fast when you tune it correctly! That would come along with some enormous goodwill, and also the assumption that if your FooDB installation is performing poorly, then it must be your fault because all the benchmarks say it’s really fast for everyone else. I’m not going to tell Bar what their business model should be. I have my thoughts on it, but it’s their business to run as they see fit. But if I see Bar being open and helpful with a freely-accessible tech blog telling you how to make FooDB stand up and dance, I’ll tend to believe that it’s probably an interesting product to look at. If they guard those secrets behind a wall of lawyers and sue people who speak ill of FooDB, I’ll tend to believe they’ve got something to hide. Either one of those beliefs might be completely wrong, but that’s still how I’m likely to perceive it.
floren 4y ago
You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own, well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...
- larkinrichards 4y ago
  Can one provide a benchmarking suite that anyone can execute without posting the results of the test? Thus allowing others to run the test themselves easily but not putting you on the hook for the result?
  - floren 4y ago
    As I understand it you can give instructions and probably even build tools to do the benchmarking, it's just that when the Splunk customer runs those tools, they are forbidden to share the results with you or anyone else.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Can you give your name ? I'm fighting against our Splunk decommission project because the big boys tell us we can just use ELK, to which we reply that it means months of devs to reproduce Splunk abilities, to which they reply human cost is invisible but license cost is a sore point for the board... I love Splunk, it works so well after data is ingested so... who are you if you're better?
  - floren 4y ago
    It's Gravwell (gravwell.io). Depending on exactly what you're doing in Splunk, it could be a pretty easy transition, and we've even started writing tools to migrate data out of Splunk and into Gravwell. We've got a free 14GB/day community license if you'd like to play with it on your own, or you can email sales for a POC.
- car_analogy 4y ago
jamesblonde 4y ago
Our database RonDB, by Mikael Ronstrom ex MySQL, is Dewitt free and we promise to keep it that way. Even though it is now managed DB in the cloud.
KronisLV 4y ago
> Oracle also inserted a clause in their terms of use that boiled down to the fact that one can’t publish benchmarks without getting an explicit approval from Oracle. This feels horrible and would make me look away from any software that has such a clause. Then again, i use very little proprietary software in place and when i don't, it's mostly due to someone else choosing it for a project and me just needing to bite the bullet. Though in regards to databases, i'm not sure why you'd fork over the cash and use something proprietary, unless you're trying to get rid of any sort of liability on your own end. Then again, i'm pretty sure that you could also find someone to offer support for your PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB deployment, if you wanted to waste money (or did anything so interesting where such support would be warranted). > Some cloud vendors permit you to benchmark their service but require reciprocity: you must make the benchmark reproducible and allow benchmarking of your own service or tool in response. This is a bit better in comparison. Though licenses in general puzzle me. For example, MongoDB is licensed under SSPL so anyone who offers it as a cloud service would have to open source their entire infrastructure: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license And yet i don't think that Digital Ocean is: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mongodb https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mong... (or maybe they offer the older non-SSPL version). The whole enforcement angle feels like it would probably impact an individual who benchmarks databases instead of reading bunches of legalese more, for example, than it would impact a larger company that could "figure things out".
- redwood 4y ago
  That looks like an official DO partnership
RedShift1 4y ago
Having only cursory experience with Oracle databases (as in install and run some queries and that's it), is there any advantage to them over MariaDB or PostgreSQL? Better development experience, easier to tune or no tuning necessary, anything that makes it worth over the free database servers?
- Xelbair 4y ago
  As someone who worked with Oracle DB for a quite some time. Stay as far away form it as possible. It only exists to milk already 'captured' companies, and all competitive niche advantages it had were slowly taken over by postgres.
- tetha 4y ago
  About 10 or 15 years ago, OracleDB was years and years ahead of other databases. They had better replication, they had a better query optimizer, they had better storage management. OracleDB was the big thing you wanted in a business for a reason. However, by now, MariaDB and especially PostgreSQL have caught up so much that this edge is gone and it feels like they are just siphoning money from companies who have invested in their big oracle cluster years ago. I do veto any new oracle-first or oracle-only development at work.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  As someone who spent some time in Oracle land: MariaDB can't hold a candle to it, but postgresql comes close. Some things better in Oracle vs Postgres (and I might be dated on my postgres knowledge):. The active/active failover story of Oracle is better with RAC. Auto vacuum horror stories don't exist in Oracle. Also pro oracle: The 'enterprise' ecosystem is better. Everything enterprisey integrates with oracle, postgresql is still a toss up. But at the end of the day, I still vastly prefer postgresql. The endless list of weird idiosyncracies and weird limitations in oracle makes you always feel a bit dirty, compared to the relatively clean syntax of postgresql. In oracle land, it is common to wait 1 major version before using new features, because they are unstable when released. And dealing with oracle support is hell with an additional bonus of pain. They take months for a simple bug fix. They won't admit a bug exists, then call you at 3AM and give you a patch written 2 years ago. Oracle licensing is a game for advanced poker players. It will be expensive. Then you negotiate, walk away with a 40% discount, making it more expensive than competitors, and find out later it was still a bad deal. They'll interprete standard words like CPU in a slightly different way in their licenses, and finding out in an audit will cost you a lot. Licensing is a never ending drain on your time, and you will loose their games in the end.

109 points by arjunnarayan 4y ago

Has either the Dewitt clause or the Dewitt Embrace ever resulted in some kind of legal action? It seems like more of a threat stance to various partners and ecosystem players than anything else.

igorlukanin 4y ago
I think someone from Oracle would be more informed on that matter. JK. On a more serious note, who would dare to displease a multibillion corp with hundreds of lawyers (without being backed by a similar co & lawyers)?
- rckoepke 4y ago
  Could you pirate the database, then hide behind the fifth amendment to not reveal that you're a pirate while simultaneously asserting that you never agreed to any EULA? I'm not sure what the legal rights are here. I'm certain someone in say, China or Russia, could pirate the database and run benchmarks on it with no repercussions. Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas technology analyst firm.
  - xen0 4y ago
    > Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas technology analyst firm. How much are you willing to pay for a legally dubious benchmark?
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Does anyone ever pay for benchmarks? Or are they web content used to lure in new contracts?
  - eastbound 4y ago
    The Fifth only protects the innocents. It’s a fun twist of this amendment - if you are guilty you do not have a right to keep silent.
    - Xelbair 4y ago
      and in any sane legal system you are innocent until proven guilty.
    - jkaplowitz 4y ago
      That's true if you've been convicted and sentenced for the crime regarding which your testimony would self-incriminate, but not otherwise. Someone who has committed the crime but hasn't yet been convicted and sentenced still falls under its protection, assuming there isn't a grant of immunity from prosecution to force the testimony anyway.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Other way around, sadly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States Convicted felons are exempt from the portion of the National Firearms Act that requires that machine guns (and other NFA items like short barreled shotguns) be registered as it would violate their 5th Amendment rights.
      - donatj 4y ago
        Huh, that is one of the most interesting supreme court decisions I think I've read. I kind of agree with it in a text-of-the-law sense. I would be very curious to see that logic hold up in court these days. They got Al Capone on tax evasion for instance, but wouldn't paying his taxes on ill-got funds have been incriminating?
  - mindslight 4y ago
    It's much simpler than that. Person A installs database on a shared or to-be-sold computer, requires a license for the installation process to make a copy, "agrees" to EULA. Person B then runs benchmarks on said computer, which does not require a license because no copy is being made, and publishes the results. The only flaw in this is that Oracle will send its mafia enforcers to break your kneecaps despite not having a valid legal case. So you'll lose even if you technically can win.
- _lqaf 4y ago
  These things become substantially easier when approached correctly. In this case, never run Oracle software. Not only will it vastly improve your mood during budget season; your developers will be less likely to stab you in your sleep and you will never worry about their primary line of business: lawsuits. And you don't care how they benchmark.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Here the Jal clause is born: You are now allowed to speak about what Oracle’s main line of business is.
bluestreak 4y ago
It does result in cease and desist threats quite often. We have been on the receiving end of one.
- igorlukanin 4y ago
  Oh! Would love to learn more :—) As I'm the author of the blog post in question, I can think of including your account there, if you'd like to.

GorillaWarfare 4y ago

Could this article comparing DeWitt Clauses be considered benchmarking?

deleted 4y ago
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igorlukanin 4y ago
Or benchmarketing?
jkaplowitz 4y ago
No, it's just an analysis of the licenses, not of the software itself.

Nextgrid 4y ago

If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

noasaservice 4y ago
Its mainly related to MSSQL and Horracle. Horracle will just use their legal team (which is bigger than their engineers and developers) to bludgeon you over benchmarks.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  "This just in Oracle legal team takes down entire Tor Network" Jokes aside, I'm surprised they're so touchy about these things. They can make plenty of money without it, they can also save plenty of money with less lawyers.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    If rationality was always used we wouldn't have had Putin making a gigantic, catastrophic geopolitical mistake. A little common sense goes an awful long way, but only if you choose to use it. MSSQL is destroying its own market by its pricing (and the licensing thicket, jesus christ, I've been looking at them for 2 days now and... shudder)
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      Used to just use PostgresSQL on Azure just fine. I am really surprised people use MSSQL or Oracle today honestly. You really don't need to tie yourself down to a proprietary DB anymore.
igorlukanin 4y ago
How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark published by a noname researcher seriously?

chmod775 4y ago

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

fragmede 4y ago
Oracle Virtualbox is pretty good, and free for personal use. They also make patches available for their Oracle Linux kernel - the UEK, and in a better format than RedHat.
- jrockway 4y ago
  They are aggressive about the "personal use" thing. I used to work for an ISP. Apparently our customers would download Virtualbox, Oracle would pull the IPs out of their logs, find us, and then email us and ask us to buy a license. (More threatening than asking nicely, IIRC.) We informed them that we're an ISP and those IP addresses are our customers', not our office. And no, we didn't give them the contact information of our customers. I wonder how many of their sales reps have gone after Spectrum and Comcast since the whole work from home thing started.
native_samples 4y ago
They've done a lot of good stuff with Java.
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josephcsible 4y ago
If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.

jenny91 4y ago

All the BSL/SSPL ones shouldn't be in an "open source" section. Just change the heading to "source available" or put them with the "vendors".

igorlukanin 4y ago
Author of the blog post in question here. Let me clarify: they shouldn't be there because they're not OSI-approved, right? Just wanna get your point here. (While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes of this post.)
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Not just lack of OSI approval, they're attempting to redefine the long accepted meaning of open source to include their new licenses. They want the goodwill of being "open source" without the obligations. The only sorts of licenses that have consistently been considered open source are either copyleft licenses like the GPL and do whatever the hell you want licenses like MIT and Apache. Do whatever you want... unless you're a big corporation... or unless you're part of a group the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical... etc. is a massive departure from the spirit of the term open source.
  - l33t2328 4y ago
    > unless you're part of a group the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical. What parts of the license mention that?
    - barkingcat 4y ago
      It is most likely in the "Additional Use Grant" which is tricky - because this additional use grant is distinct to each product licensed under the BSL. This additional use grant is also not that easy to find, since some licenses display it prominently, and others hide it under some additional legal fineprint[1,2]. From mariadb site: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#limits https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#limits "Q: What are the usage limitations under BSL? A: The usage is limited to non-production use, or production use within the limits of the “Additional Use Grant” defined by the vendor using BSL and specific to each BSL product." [1] obvious Additional Use Grant for Couchbase, included clearly in https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/ https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/ [2] it is extremely difficult to find the Additional Use Grant for Mariadb products themselves. For MaxScale, which is their proxy product, it is buried in a file within the source code (which on the surface level might be a good place for it, but it's not very easy to find and I had to go through lots of legal print to get to it) : https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LICENSE25.TXT https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LIC... or https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LICENSE6.TXT https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LIC... depending on which version you are trying to use, etc.

tetha 4y ago

Interesting. As a SaaS vendor, we do not allow performance testing of the production system. Because, you know, just casually saturating production resources can become very iffy for strange and unexpected reasons. And you will always be able to saturate a system, or a subsystem of the subsystem of the system. However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing to pay for it, with performance testing environments. We have, however, usually survived into the curiosity phase - "just how much to I have to throw at this thing to break it?".

josephcsible 4y ago
There's a really big difference between "don't performance test on our hardware that you're sharing with other tenants" and "don't performance test on our software no matter whose hardware it's running on".
Beltalowda 4y ago
Looking at the language, almost all of them allow you to run benchmarks since it's phrased as "you may not publish benchmark results"; it doesn't forbid to actually run them. Never mind that MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. are not SaaS vendors of course. To be honest, if a cloud vendor has technical problems with someone running a few benchmarks then that would make me very wary of said cloud vendor. What's the difference between a "benchmark" and "using all resources I paid for" anyway?
- danielheath 4y ago
  For a smaller/younger SAAS: If a customer environment is suddenly running at 100% of some resource when it wasn’t before, that’s an important thing to alert on / investigate. For established players it’s lost in the noise, but if it were me I’d appreciate a heads up for big changes.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Sure, a heads-up is certainly nice, but I don't think that running a (reasonable) set of benchmarks is all that out of the ordinary, or any different from just taxing the service at 100% with some periodic batch job or the like. Paying for it is even stranger IMO. And for what it's worth, I did actually work for a few small SaaS businesses, but a few reasonable benchmarks wouldn't have been a problem. Of course, if your benchmarks are going to take 50 hours it's a different story. Also: I suspect a lot of these database SaaS services are a lot smaller than you'd might think. I know at least one of them is anyway because I worked there (and there's no DeWitt Clause).

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dwohnitmok 4y ago

One of my personal bugbears is the DeWitt Clause for Datomic, especially because knowing the performance profile of Datomic is very important for understanding whether your app will be a good fit for it given some of its peculiarities.

casion 4y ago
You're free to benchmark it yourself and not publish the results. The performance of it depends heavily on a variety of factors which may it or may not apply to you. Like a lot of software, the devil is in the details.

kstrauser 4y ago

Honestly, the presence of that clause screams to me "this app sucks and we'll sue you if you tell anyone how badly". That may not be the case whatsoever, but my first assumption is that they're trying to hide terrible performance.

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jandrewrogers 4y ago
While I would prefer if this clause was not a thing, I also understand why it exists even for great products. It is surprisingly difficult to reproduce many workload benchmarks and quite easy to engineer a benchmark that misrepresents real-world database performance. There are tools that exist to generate optimally pathological workloads that target specific database implementations, while looking completely reasonable and innocuous. It doesn't even need to be a bad faith benchmark by a competitor, there is a high probability that the person configuring the environment does not know how to do it correctly and/or optimally. The DeWitt Clause is a defense against the unfortunate pervasiveness of incompetent and/or bad faith benchmarking. Companies have a well-founded reason to not trust third parties to do a good job of representing the performance of their product.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  I understand your point, and that’s a reasonable argument. I do disagree with it, though. Imagine a hypothetical FooDB by Bar, Inc. If Bar never put that clause in the FooDB license, then I think you’re absolutely right. People would come up with some awful-looking benchmarks that made it look bad. However, what a golden opportunity for Bar! They could step up with some free or steeply discounted consulting to help the benchmarker fix the problem and publish new, good results. They wouldn’t have to do that too many times for word to get around on sites like this: FooDB is nice and fast when you tune it correctly! That would come along with some enormous goodwill, and also the assumption that if your FooDB installation is performing poorly, then it must be your fault because all the benchmarks say it’s really fast for everyone else. I’m not going to tell Bar what their business model should be. I have my thoughts on it, but it’s their business to run as they see fit. But if I see Bar being open and helpful with a freely-accessible tech blog telling you how to make FooDB stand up and dance, I’ll tend to believe that it’s probably an interesting product to look at. If they guard those secrets behind a wall of lawyers and sue people who speak ill of FooDB, I’ll tend to believe they’ve got something to hide. Either one of those beliefs might be completely wrong, but that’s still how I’m likely to perceive it.

floren 4y ago

You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own, well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

larkinrichards 4y ago
Can one provide a benchmarking suite that anyone can execute without posting the results of the test? Thus allowing others to run the test themselves easily but not putting you on the hook for the result?
- floren 4y ago
  As I understand it you can give instructions and probably even build tools to do the benchmarking, it's just that when the Splunk customer runs those tools, they are forbidden to share the results with you or anyone else.
xwolfi 4y ago
Can you give your name ? I'm fighting against our Splunk decommission project because the big boys tell us we can just use ELK, to which we reply that it means months of devs to reproduce Splunk abilities, to which they reply human cost is invisible but license cost is a sore point for the board... I love Splunk, it works so well after data is ingested so... who are you if you're better?
- floren 4y ago
  It's Gravwell (gravwell.io). Depending on exactly what you're doing in Splunk, it could be a pretty easy transition, and we've even started writing tools to migrate data out of Splunk and into Gravwell. We've got a free 14GB/day community license if you'd like to play with it on your own, or you can email sales for a POC.
car_analogy 4y ago

jamesblonde 4y ago

Our database RonDB, by Mikael Ronstrom ex MySQL, is Dewitt free and we promise to keep it that way. Even though it is now managed DB in the cloud.

KronisLV 4y ago

> Oracle also inserted a clause in their terms of use that boiled down to the fact that one can’t publish benchmarks without getting an explicit approval from Oracle. This feels horrible and would make me look away from any software that has such a clause. Then again, i use very little proprietary software in place and when i don't, it's mostly due to someone else choosing it for a project and me just needing to bite the bullet. Though in regards to databases, i'm not sure why you'd fork over the cash and use something proprietary, unless you're trying to get rid of any sort of liability on your own end. Then again, i'm pretty sure that you could also find someone to offer support for your PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB deployment, if you wanted to waste money (or did anything so interesting where such support would be warranted). > Some cloud vendors permit you to benchmark their service but require reciprocity: you must make the benchmark reproducible and allow benchmarking of your own service or tool in response. This is a bit better in comparison. Though licenses in general puzzle me. For example, MongoDB is licensed under SSPL so anyone who offers it as a cloud service would have to open source their entire infrastructure: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license And yet i don't think that Digital Ocean is: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mongodb https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mong... (or maybe they offer the older non-SSPL version). The whole enforcement angle feels like it would probably impact an individual who benchmarks databases instead of reading bunches of legalese more, for example, than it would impact a larger company that could "figure things out".

redwood 4y ago
That looks like an official DO partnership

RedShift1 4y ago

Having only cursory experience with Oracle databases (as in install and run some queries and that's it), is there any advantage to them over MariaDB or PostgreSQL? Better development experience, easier to tune or no tuning necessary, anything that makes it worth over the free database servers?

Xelbair 4y ago
As someone who worked with Oracle DB for a quite some time. Stay as far away form it as possible. It only exists to milk already 'captured' companies, and all competitive niche advantages it had were slowly taken over by postgres.
tetha 4y ago
About 10 or 15 years ago, OracleDB was years and years ahead of other databases. They had better replication, they had a better query optimizer, they had better storage management. OracleDB was the big thing you wanted in a business for a reason. However, by now, MariaDB and especially PostgreSQL have caught up so much that this edge is gone and it feels like they are just siphoning money from companies who have invested in their big oracle cluster years ago. I do veto any new oracle-first or oracle-only development at work.
hyperman1 4y ago
As someone who spent some time in Oracle land: MariaDB can't hold a candle to it, but postgresql comes close. Some things better in Oracle vs Postgres (and I might be dated on my postgres knowledge):. The active/active failover story of Oracle is better with RAC. Auto vacuum horror stories don't exist in Oracle. Also pro oracle: The 'enterprise' ecosystem is better. Everything enterprisey integrates with oracle, postgresql is still a toss up. But at the end of the day, I still vastly prefer postgresql. The endless list of weird idiosyncracies and weird limitations in oracle makes you always feel a bit dirty, compared to the relatively clean syntax of postgresql. In oracle land, it is common to wait 1 major version before using new features, because they are unstable when released. And dealing with oracle support is hell with an additional bonus of pain. They take months for a simple bug fix. They won't admit a bug exists, then call you at 3AM and give you a patch written 2 years ago. Oracle licensing is a game for advanced poker players. It will be expensive. Then you negotiate, walk away with a 40% discount, making it more expensive than competitors, and find out later it was still a bad deal. They'll interprete standard words like CPU in a slightly different way in their licenses, and finding out in an audit will cost you a lot. Licensing is a never ending drain on your time, and you will loose their games in the end.