Inquiry on Citus license terms for a commercial SaaS application

[tiwary]

We are building a microservices-based commercial solution at our company. Depending on the customer, we will deploy both on customer prem directly and on the cloud (across different regions) as a SaaS-based service. Due to the volume of data we handle, we need our Postgres to scale horizontally and Citus fits our needs perfectly. However, we are cautious about the AGPL license terms and need to know if we will be required to publish our entire codebase if we go down the Citus route.

We don't intend to make any modifications to Citus at any point, or even rebuild it. The only way to interact with the database would be via golang database drivers, and only our internal services will ever query the database. Our solution will never publish any public API to interact directly with the database in any way.

The language on the Citus FAQ page (https://www.citusdata.com/faq) seems to suggest that the client drivers are PostgreSQL licensed and only the Citus extension itself is AGPL licensed. Our use case mentioned about shouldn’t violate any license terms based on our interpretation, but it would be great if someone from Citus can also clarify this. Thanks.

[marcocitus]

Our use case mentioned about shouldn’t violate any license terms based on our interpretation, but it would be great if someone from Citus can also clarify this. Thanks.

Agreed!

[007reader]

Is it possible to clarify Citusdata’s position in the official FAQ? Lawyers only trust official statements, not informal comments …