Were they hoping that people wouldn't notice?

The products even have github repos! There's just no source in them.

It's open source cosplay.

I am stilling that phrase. It's perfect.

To some, the answer is “open source” no matter the question. Hello wagging tail, meet dog.

I especially don't trust free shit if I don't have access and control of the future of the code. Even then it's not a sure thing.

I can't imagine a clearer example of circular reasoning.

I can lift exactly as much weight as I decide to put on the barbell.

Marketing performance is an incredibly confoundable variable.

For example, I have heard one commercial at least 5 times in the last week: advertising open positions at McDonald's. Part of that very commercial stated that, "1 in 8 people have worked at a McDonald's." I am literally one of those people! How could anyone possibly measure the effectiveness of that commercial? Is it even meant to be effective at all?

The overwhelming majority of advertising I see is from "household name brands". The notion I have heard is that the goal is not to introduce themselves to new customers, or even drive more traffic to their brand: it's to keep their status as a "household name". Do they do this because it is effective, or because they are simply big enough to afford it?

Really depends on your metrics. Very little of it builds long-term trust that didn't already exist. Much of it abuses long-term trust.

See the discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590734

A copyright license is a copyright license: in theory, all a copyright license does is give you additional rights to use something. Using a license like Apache 2 for binaries is somewhat unconventional, but it's totally possible. It (obviously) does not give you access to the source code, and I think this could never work with the GPL and other copyleft licenses because they use wording that implies you need to distrubute the source code, which you don't have.

The copyright owner, of course, has ownership, so their obligations don't really change by virtue of giving someone a copyright license. As far as I know, they could give someone a license to use something that is completely invalid and could never actually be used, and they can definitely do things like stop distributing under one license and switch to another. They own the source code, and they own the binaries (I believe the binaries would be considered a sort of derivative work in copyright terms, but again, not a lawyer.) So when they distribute a binary under a given license, it's unrelated to any particular distribution of source code. The only time this gets complex is when the ownership of a asset is split among many disparate parties, at which point everyone is pretty much beholden to the copyright licenses; like open source projects without CLAs. But if they own the source code entirely, they could, for example, distribute some source code under GPL, but then distribute modified binaries under a commercial license with a EULA, and not redistribute the modified source code, since it's their code to license to others, not a license they are subjected to themselves.

> You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that (...)

Applying this only to their binaries directly contradicts what the license says.

It's certainly weird for the binary license to be Apache, rather than some proprietary EULA, though.

> You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form

This is actually an interesting question. But I can’t see how a binary only distribution would be in the spirit of the Apache license.

It is in the spirit and the letter of the license to do binary only distribution.

Why do you think so many companies are pushing the Apache License 2.0 over the GPL?

The Apache license 2 is pretty clear that binary only distribution is allowed, but I think it’s also clear that the assumption is that source is available in some form. Otherwise, why would you care about derivative works?

As is, it would be possible to decompile the JVM code into something resembling source code and then distribute that with or without modification. Which just seems odd to me.

What a weird choice to make.

1. Architecture - XTDB is designed to work with Kafka, but it also works with typical JDBC databases as a datastore. Datomic can use SQL databases, DynamoDB or Cassandra if you want distribution. I personally would think long and hard before I introduced a distributed database to my organisation "because it scales".

Part of the value proposition of Datomic is it easily scales read workloads horizontally and by isolating read and writes into separate processes it improves write performance significantly. The metric usually thrown around is 75% of CPU cycles in a traditional RDBMS are concurrency coordination, which is avoided by the Datomic model. That number is quite old now so I don't know if it's still accurate as of 2023.

2. Query language - both use Datalog and support the Datomic `pull` syntax. XTDB also supports SQL.

3. Datomic's EAVT quadruplets are a compelling feature because they are so generic and can be used/re-used in many contexts. A document database would have to fit your use case pretty directly.

4. Datomic has a single transactor process. Do you need distributed transactions? Does Datomic need distributed transactions? You'd have to find someone from say, Nubank, and ask them for war stories. :-)

5. Datomic is now free-as-in-beer.

In my unqualified opinion XTDB is appropriate to choose in the following situations:

- You need to model "valid time" as part of your domain.

- Do you want a document database and are happy with everything that entails?

- You need access to the source code of your database.

- Do you have existing analysts who know SQL but don't know or can't learn Datalog?

I can feel the internal open vs. closed source argument from here.