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0 pointsmdasen3y ago0 comments

I'd also note that the agreement doesn't provide a license for non-development purposes. "Crunchy Data provides access to Crunchy Developer Software free of charge for development purposes", but there's nothing that says that they provide access for other purposes.

Basically, the license seems to be (and IANAL): we provide the software for development purposes...without a subscription, it's only intended for development purposes

They didn't say "we provide this software for your use...without a subscription, it's only intended for development purposes". They basically said: we provide this software for development purposes, it's only intended for development purposes.

If it's only a disclaimer, where's the grant of rights to use the software beyond development purposes?

Yes, if I were a lawyer defending a user, I'd definitely be arguing your point. However, I think Crunchy Data's lawyer would simply point out that there's literally no grant in the license for non-development purposes. Maybe a judge would take pity on you given that it seems hidden, has some ambiguity (though maybe it's not ambiguous to a lawyer), and because they allow you to spin up the operator basically without ever knowing these terms exist.

Given that there are many other PostgreSQL operators from companies like Percona (which I think has a great and long track record of supporting open source databases), EnterpriseDB, and Zalando, I don't see why I'd want to choose Crunchy Data.

You might be right and I think you would be right if only looking at the piece I quoted, but given that there's no general grant in the license that the "intended for" is merely a disclaimer for, it seems like the license grant is that they provide access for development purposes. IANAL and I'd rather work with software and companies where I don't have to be a lawyer. Crunchy Data could have said "We provide access to this software free of charge for any purpose. Without a subscription, it is unsupported and not intended for production use. We are not responsible for anything that happens if you use it in production." That's not what they said. They said that they provide it "free of charge for development purposes" with no grant for non-development purposes.

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sbuttgereit3y ago

I agree that the developer program ToS is written in a confusing manner and suggests that you can't use it all for production without a license. I expect that to be intentional: if the impression you get is that you can't even use their software in production, it's much less likely that you will do so with the impression that there is any support, warranty, or endorsement of such use.

[EDIT: I made an error, I originally said that it was explicit about no license being granted for the software, but that was about things like no license for service marks and trade names.]

On the other hand, there is a license for postgres-operator and it looks like Apache 2.0:

https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator/blob/master...

For what's being distributed in their Docker container image, I imagine it depends on what they're actually distributing for that to matter. I expect that it's mostly other people's software (like PostgreSQL) and that the Docker page listing the container just too much of a summary to say anything about licensing. I'd investigate that further to clarify license status prior to use, but expect it to not be legally constrained to non-production use only.

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