Posted by poly2it 18 hours ago
Now, I don't know how MIT -> AGPL re-licensing specifics work, but still.
For example, if I compiled PG into x86-64 assembly, and then decompiled it into C (via, say, IDA), and then polished that decompiled C code into very readable C code, it is still a derived work. For some reason, people think that if you include an LLM or Agent, copyright can be ignored, and plagiarism is now no longer possible.
It is similar to the crypto-folks thinking that if you use crypto, you no longer have to pay taxes, because the internet/computers make all inconvenient realities go away.
Honestly, such flagrant and arrogant copyright violations make it hard for me to take the project seriously, because it seems like a desperate stunt for attention (which itself may be a solid business move, but that is besides the point).
Put differently, if one were to fork pgrust, strip away the new license and copyright, and restore the original PG license and copyright (while also adding malisper+team to that copyright), they would face no legal consequences at all. In fact, they would probably be a less legal risk than the pgrust team.
This is correct
> and thus a fork, and should thus have the original license and copyright preserved)
This is not correct. The Postgres license is permissive. We need to include a copy of the license (which we do in the NOTICE file[0]) but we CAN relicense the Postgres code however we want as long as we meet the requirements of the license. pgrust is a derived work of Postgres, but Postgres allows derived works to be under a different license.
And your sales folks would call and say: "No need to change anything, we still run PostgreSQL, and ours is just called pgrust, but it's N times as fast".
I’ve done some experiments replacing spatial SQL queries with custom vectorised batch mode code in C# and the speed up was astonishing.
The people dubious about these claims have no idea what their computers are really capable of.
If you're interested in trying it out, please reach out to me at malis@pgrust.com
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.
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.
I consider AGPL a poison pill in my work. That is not true with a suitable commercial license, although I expect a lot more commercial product (support/features/etc). As you note, your objective is to prevent commercialization of your software, but radically speeding up analytics is primarily a concern of large organizations so it seems like a mismatch in purpose.
That's up to GCP then. I'm sure OP would be willing to license pgrust to them for an appropriate price.
You should be setting up a CLA process then ASAP if you are looking to take outside contributions.
Will await a MIT based fork myself.
AGPL is untested in courts. There is no definitive definition of what could be considered within the blast radius such that it would require AGPL licensing.
There's a reason AGPL is banned at Google and most sane companies. It's simply too dangerous.
You can't simply say "clients aren't bound" because it depends.
I'd rather see the BSL used here to be perfectly honest. At least it's simple.
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.
Wait, sorry, you're asking why make something enterprise customers might pay for, and then not give it away to them for free?
PS Learn how DBs do joins for more information. Specifically the differences between hash joins, merge joins and nested loop joins. They are basically fancy ways to page part of your working set to disk at huge performance penalties.
PPS As memory gets more expensive, these techniques get more valuable. When it gets cheap, they lose value.
[0]: With Exhibit B, which prevents relicensing to GPL. It is also analogous to CDDL.
I doubt even 30000x faster would prompt a policy change.
> light-years away from what happened here
There is also zero evidence a human has reviewed a meaningful amount of the code generated for the port, let alone the original C code from Postgres, given the size/scale of the project and the how quickly it was produced.
Also, you can successfully sell a systems project that is only 10% faster. 30000x faster and they are throwing illegal and debauched things through your window to get access to your improvements.
What does it being system code have to do with anything?
Most systems code has to be "canonical". That means it can't be improved. Imagine the most difficult PR review you have ever had. Now give the reviewers OCD and an extra 30 IQ points. And every single code change has to live up to this standard. That's what it has to do with this.
You didn't express anything unique to systems engineering.
Yes, at [tech corp dayjob], any dependency is likely to be banned for arbitrary reasons if you bring it to the attention of the wrong people. It doesn't have to go against any of our policies e.g. don't mention anything with GPL in the name around the "risk" people. In fact, do not ever talk to the "risk" people and hope they don't talk to you.
Latest news: Apparently, devtools are a legal risk. Basic reverse-engineering of client-side JS is now banned.
The delusions really seem to scale with headcount.
What we don’t know for sure is whether there is any copyright for LLM-generated code. The license might be irrelevant!
hey claude, do a breakthrough
You can find the actual git history at the v0.2 github tag.
Co-Authored-By: Fable <noreply@anthropic.com>
It's easy to claim AI slop nowadays, but you should still mistrust-but-verify.
> "do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample"
We're literally talking about an "X but in Rust" project already...
[0] https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/#system=+liH|pgrs|gQ&type=-...