[tesch1]

Counterpoint: It's actually very astute of them to start like this.

In order to have a viable business model they need to create value for users. Users are intelligent and will not even consider trying something that has no exit path, should the company disappear.

What every company hopes to have is customers who are thrilled with the value they deliver and tell everyone what a great deal it is so the company can grow.

What no company hopes for is to end up like hashicorp, where they end up spending more investment $ than the value they provide, never achieve profitability, and eventually just piss everyone off, and everyone is trying to make the best of a leveraged situation, they end up having to pull the rug. The user's leverage in that situation is something like opentofu, made possible by the license, same as what's being offered here.

The price of the big columnar dbs is very high, so there's a lot of ground to capture / value to arbitrage/offer in this space - as evidenced by other comments in this thread, how fast the benchmarks are changing, the likelihood of memory prices coming down, etc.

Aside from that, you have to wonder big picture if the AI space will put significant downward pressure on memory and compute prices with everyone wanting to run local LLMs, might change some fundamental tradeoffs made in db systems. If in 10 years I can get a phone with a 1 TB of fast access RAM to ask siri how to sauté mushrooms, what will 99% of us need columnar store for?