<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>akulkarni</author><text>Timescale Co-founder here. Happy to address your concerns!&lt;p&gt;1. Monetization strategy&lt;p&gt;This funding round is actually a sign that our business model is working really well.&lt;p&gt;To quote Redpoint Ventures, who led this funding round:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;quot;The [Timescale] team capitalized on their significant community momentum last year, with their cloud business being one of the fastest-growing database businesses we have seen in the past 20+ years.&amp;quot; [0]
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2. Licensing&lt;p&gt;Most companies (including open-source companies) actually have both open-source and proprietary software, but the proprietary software is often hidden inside private repos. The difference with Timescale is that we have made the source code for our proprietary software available (on Github), even allowing users to modify it (eg &amp;quot;right to repair), and made all of our software free (ie no paid software features). [1]&lt;p&gt;3. Public product roadmap&lt;p&gt;We aim to be transparent re: product roadmap via Github, blog posts, etc, but I appreciate the feedback that we could be more transparent. Thanks!&lt;p&gt;4. Version compatibility &amp;#x2F; broken APIs&lt;p&gt;Could you say more? AFIAK the only time we &amp;quot;broke&amp;quot; (ie changed) some APIs is with TimescaleDB 2.0, and when we did so we explained why we did that (mostly to improve user experience based on feedback). We take this topic very seriously and even the decision to do so in 2.0 was not something we did lightly (and it was also made after a lot of discussion with users). More about this decision here in our docs: [2]&lt;p&gt;5.  Commercial support for on-premise&lt;p&gt;We offer free support for on-premise instances via Slack (where you can often find our engineers, support team, CTO, and myself). [3] However, if you would like a higher level of support for on premise (e.g., commercial SLAs), please reach out to us directly (e.g., via the form on that same page). [3]&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;redpoint-ventures&amp;#x2F;building-a-next-generation-database-our-investment-in-timescale-59e9a1d1d6f9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;redpoint-ventures&amp;#x2F;building-a-next-generat...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-open-source-busines...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;timescaledb&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;overview&amp;#x2F;release-notes&amp;#x2F;changes-in-timescaledb-2&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;timescaledb&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;overview&amp;#x2F;relea...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;support&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timescale.com&amp;#x2F;support&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>Croftengea</author><text>TimescaleDB is a great product, but if you plan to go with them long term, there are few points to consider:&lt;p&gt;* They are still trying to figure out their monetization strategy. Initially, they betted on their on-premise Enterprise version, then abandoned it. Now they are pushing their cloud version.&lt;p&gt;* Even though most of their code licensed under Apache license, some code is under their proprietary license.&lt;p&gt;* I&amp;#x27;m sure one can get some ideas about their development directions from their issue tracker and source code, but they don&amp;#x27;t have any public product roadmap.&lt;p&gt;* Even though the product itself is technically very stable, the version compatibility leaves a lot to be desired. There are removed features and broken APIs from version to version.&lt;p&gt;* Their commercial support terms for on-premise instances don&amp;#x27;t seem to be well defined, not publicly at least.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>TimescaleDB raises $40M</title><url>https://blog.timescale.com/blog/40-million-to-help-developers-measure-everything-that-matters/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>For background, I haven&amp;#x27;t used TimescaleDB before, but I&amp;#x27;ve done some pretty advanced ORM work to vertically shard PG tables in Rails and I know PG pretty well, so I&amp;#x27;m quite curious about TimescaleDB.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; * Even though most of their code licensed under Apache license, some code is under their proprietary license.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really think this is a perfectly fair characterization. Their proprietary license is essentially &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t host a cloud database and charge for it&amp;quot; to stop Amazon from building TimescaleDB right into RDS, or similar.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s a totally fair license without too much to worry about if they go out of business.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; * Even though the product itself is technically very stable, the version compatibility leaves a lot to be desired. There are removed features and broken APIs from version to version.&lt;p&gt;This would be my biggest worry. Upgrading Postgres is already stressful enough, having to deal with broken APIs from version to version would leave me pretty upset, though I&amp;#x27;ve not heard of anyone complain about this before, so I&amp;#x27;m not sure how much of a problem this is in practice.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Croftengea</author><text>TimescaleDB is a great product, but if you plan to go with them long term, there are few points to consider:&lt;p&gt;* They are still trying to figure out their monetization strategy. Initially, they betted on their on-premise Enterprise version, then abandoned it. Now they are pushing their cloud version.&lt;p&gt;* Even though most of their code licensed under Apache license, some code is under their proprietary license.&lt;p&gt;* I&amp;#x27;m sure one can get some ideas about their development directions from their issue tracker and source code, but they don&amp;#x27;t have any public product roadmap.&lt;p&gt;* Even though the product itself is technically very stable, the version compatibility leaves a lot to be desired. There are removed features and broken APIs from version to version.&lt;p&gt;* Their commercial support terms for on-premise instances don&amp;#x27;t seem to be well defined, not publicly at least.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>TimescaleDB raises $40M</title><url>https://blog.timescale.com/blog/40-million-to-help-developers-measure-everything-that-matters/</url></story>