Is there something specific you wanted to do that was prohibited by a license. I thought most of the licenses you’re talking about just prohibited you from reselling the database as a service.

A client introduced me to Arangodb which I felt was a "secret weapon" that I used for a lot of side projects. Then this came out

https://arango.ai/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ADB-Community-L...

and it is dead to me. I want my head! I can accept GPL, Apache, MIT or some legit open source license. For my projects I see two possible paths which I want to have open: (1) building a commercial service on top of a database (like my RSS reader) where you can't necessarily draw a clear line between what is allowed and what is not allowed, for instance I have an adaptation layer that makes postgres look like the part of arangodb that I actually use (I do manually rewrite AQL queries into a DSL that extends AlchemyAPI) and if I did something similar over arango is this reselling? (2) an open source project where I want to tell people "go forth and use this code" and not have to hire a lawyer to know what they can and can't do.

Once a vendor has shown they have this attitude, I expect them to change their license for the worse in the future -- I just don't want to invest my time and energy in their platform.

Yes, that condition makes it no longer open source software.

It also has the effect of making software adopting such licenses getting removed from open source distributions.

It's also postgres, but timescaledb's licensing (and therefore its lack of good support in azure managed postgres) is a bummer.