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If you intend to change it to allow running open-sourced changes, you might consider allowing changes submitted to you privately too, for vulnerability reports.



Thanks for the input, will bring it back to the team for discussion.

(Note: I really appreciate getting this kind of feedback openly from the community, so thank you :-)


One possible approach compatible with true software freedom and the usual definition of open source is not to restrict use of modified versions of the code, but instead to use naming to distinguish between the two, and only support the unmodified version.

For example, the code build system could have variables for the name and maybe the logo and other trademark/brand-ish things, and the public codebase could be configured by default to call itself Timescale Community DB or Timescale Custom DB or some other name instead of TimescaleDB. Your private build would simply substitute the json file with those data values and maybe point to logos that aren't in the repo instead of generic ones that are, or something similar to that.

You'd also have the option to use any mixture of trademark law or copyright conditions to restrict the commercial version's name and branding assets.

All of the options I described above are used in reality by various projects out there. For example, the git repository for VS Code OSS has a product.json file with most of the customization points (not all) that MS changes in building their supported VS Code release, TeX and Red Hat apply naming restrictions, and Red Hat also has rules in their support contract.


It's an interesting idea. We'll consider it. Thanks!




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