YugaByte goes 100% open under Apache

Open source distributed SQL database company YugaByte has confirmed that its eponymously named YugaByte DB is now 100 percent open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

The additional homage to open source-ness means that previously commercial features now move into the open source core.

YugaByte says it hopes that this will directly create more opportunities for open collaboration between users, who will have their hands on 100% open tools.

The company had previously kept some features closed source including distributed dackups, data encryption and read replicas.

NOTE: As detailed on Quora by Shivam Gulati of AWS, a read replica is an additional instance copy you can setup for having efficient and better performing reads if your workload required the same.

“You can consider it as somewhat a slave server but not exactly the same,” notes Gulati.

The source code for YugaByte DB Platform is now available in the same GitHub repository as YugaByte DB under a new free trial-only, source available license developed by the Polyform Project.

YugaByte’s rebranded commercial offering exists with self-managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) capabilities.

“Using proprietary, non-compete licenses for database features to ward off cloud providers from offering a commercial version as-a-service is short-sighted and damaging to the foundational principles of open source software. Vendors like MongoDB and Cockroach Labs who have moved to such licenses for not just add-on features but for their core database have disowned the same developers whose initial trust lifted their previously open source project off the ground,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder and CEO, YugaByte.