pgrust seems to have good momentum. AGPL is an odd license for a non web project. Postgres is MIT-like, and that drove it's adoption.
Have pgrust folks reconsidered this? Else, IMO we can have an independant rust port of pgrust, which can be MIT, which will garner more attention.
Author here. At least for databases, AGPL (or stricter) has become standard. The issue is it's so easy for megacorps (Amazon, Google, etc) to take a permissively licensed product and monetize it at the expense of the original standard.
For instance, Mongo, Cockroach, and Materialize have all gone source available. We picked AGPL because it's the best balance between open source and prevents Amazon from just repackaging it and selling it.
If AGPL is an issue for anyone, we would be happy to dual-license under a commercial license.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be compensated for your work, but for people like myself which use a cloud managed DB solution (GCP CloudSQL PostgreSQL) it means something like this would never be available.
I consider AGPL a poison pill in my work. That is not true with a suitable commercial license, although I expect a lot more commercial product (support/features/etc). As you note, your objective is to prevent commercialization of your software, but radically speeding up analytics is primarily a concern of large organizations so it seems like a mismatch in purpose.
The whole point is to force the cloud providers to go through a contract negotiation for licensing rather than keep the door open for them. Nothing prevents the parent project from specially licensing to individual parties.
> which use a cloud managed DB solution (GCP CloudSQL PostgreSQL) it means something like this would never be available
That's up to GCP then. I'm sure OP would be willing to license pgrust to them for an appropriate price.
What's the incentive for third parties to contribute, knowing just one guy stands to benefit if the project gets monetized in such a manner?
Most of the same incentives of typical OSS contribution? It's not like other OSS projects pay out any earnings made with the product evenly across contributors.
Also, from the trajectory of the project it doesn't look like they are significantly deoendent on outside code contributions.
what exactly are your concern of using agpl db server? It doesn't force you to make rest of your system agpl.
>we would be happy to dual-license under a commercial license
> If AGPL is an issue for anyone, we would be happy to dual-license under a commercial license.
You should be setting up a CLA process then ASAP if you are looking to take outside contributions.
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Sure, that's your prerogative, and kudos for not talking up open source. I'm not amazon size so can't use it, and AGPL is a no go for DB, don't want to be forced to open source my app because I use this!
Will await a MIT based fork myself.
Why would AGPL force you to open source your app? Unless you literally compile your app with pgrust by modifying the pgrust source code, you're safe. Clients aren't bound by the AGPL because they aren't derived works.
Here we go again.
AGPL is untested in courts. There is no definitive definition of what could be considered within the blast radius such that it would require AGPL licensing.
There's a reason AGPL is banned at Google and most sane companies. It's simply too dangerous.
You can't simply say "clients aren't bound" because it depends.
I'd rather see the BSL used here to be perfectly honest. At least it's simple.
Oh bummer. I was really excited about pgrust but AGPL is a dealbreaker. Not for me personally, but it will never see wide adoption because it’s a banned license in most corporate environments. Lack of path to wide adoption means it’s dead in the water.
It’s weird because those who actually care about optimized pg gains are most likely large corporate customers. Why make a product targeting them and license it in such a way they’ll never use it?
This also hard blocks upstreaming any beneficial features into core Postgres.
AGPL seems like the right choice to me. I’m tired of companies like PlanetScale taking PostgreSQL, building a business on top of it, and then acting like PostgreSQL is theirs to control.
we have not once claimed postgres is under our control. i don't think you understand how open source works but thats ok.
> It’s weird because those who actually care about optimized pg gains are most likely large corporate customers. Why make a product targeting them and license it in such a way they’ll never use it?
Wait, sorry, you're asking why make something enterprise customers might pay for, and then not give it away to them for free?
If it is indeed 300* faster, I'm sure more rational corporations will rethink their license policy or be left in the dust.
Its 300x faster for certain tests. I could pretty easily craft tests that do this on two different systems. The author mentioned this when they talked about being able to fit an entire ResultSet into memory. That's the real trick with performance. Very few workloads are CPU bound anymore (linear algebra on the CPU for example). Almost all workloads are memory bound. So its all about moving data from memory to network, back to memory and back to network, over and over again through your microservices or DBs. If the entire working set can fit in memory, you get at least a 10x performance boost. If you have to keep even a part of the working set on disk, its a huge performance loss. And the larger fraction of the working set on disk, the worse the performance loss.
PS Learn how DBs do joins for more information. Specifically the differences between hash joins, merge joins and nested loop joins. They are basically fancy ways to page part of your working set to disk at huge performance penalties.
PPS As memory gets more expensive, these techniques get more valuable. When it gets cheap, they lose value.
License policies are made by lawyers not by programmers. And their competition will be in the exact same boat (different lawyers though). AGPL is so toxic that it tends to be checked for during M&A processes so even if the current batch of lawyers is ok with it there is a chance that a later batch of lawyers is not. Given that the target audience for this project is the larger companies you are going to end up with a very nice project and zero actual users or you will end up with AWS et all stealing your work. Databases are very hard to do successfully commercially, at a minimum you should dual license them (AGPL for 'home' use and commercial licensing for parties that will want to buy the upside but they'll demand support and other stuff besides).
This is the case when you have your own datacenter. This isn't as big a problem in the cloud. There are ways to write licenses that prevent cloud providers from stealing while allowing customers to use the software and being required to pay for it. The problem with the AGPL has to with its viral nature, not its provisions to prevent cloud vendor theft.
A project can probably use the EUPL instead of the AGPL (EUPL is to AGPL, as MPLv2[0] is to GPL). Basically, EUPL is file-based, not project based, and so it is not aggressively viral. You can use the EUPL code any way you want, as long as you make the original code available, plus any modification to the original files.
[0]: With Exhibit B, which prevents relicensing to GPL. It is also analogous to CDDL.
They could simply spend a few months and a few million tokens and get their own port, no?
I doubt even 30000x faster would prompt a policy change.
Are you suggesting the AI just rewrites the whole thing under a different license? There’s no way that’s not more dicey than the AGPL license.
That's exactly what they did here, I don't see the difference.
This is the difference. This guy took an existing source base, had Claude find specific bugs, then had Claude fix a specific bug which was then reviewed by a person. We also don't know if these changes introduce new problems yet. You are suggesting letting Claude write an entirely new source base. That's light-years away from what happened here.
There is also zero evidence a human has reviewed a meaningful amount of the code generated for the port, let alone the original C code from Postgres, given the size/scale of the project and the how quickly it was produced.
They did it on permissively licensed code would be the difference.
No. This is system code. You let an LLM loose on it, it probably fixed 20 bugs and introduces 200 more plus 5 different performance regressions. In all fairness, your average app programmer would have the same problems. That's why it takes so long to learn to be a system programmer and why it takes so long to do anything on a systems source base. For reference, systems are OSes, DBs and compilers (although compilers are very different in many ways).
Also, you can successfully sell a systems project that is only 10% faster. 30000x faster and they are throwing illegal and debauched things through your window to get access to your improvements.
> No. This is system code. You let an LLM loose on it, it probably fixed 20 bugs and introduces 200 more plus 5 different performance regressions.
What does it being system code have to do with anything?
The brittleness and difficult of writing the code. The extra complexity. The cost of bugs. And ease of creating performance degradations. If you are even asking that question, you probably don't have the experience to even have an opinion on this.
Most systems code has to be "canonical". That means it can't be improved. Imagine the most difficult PR review you have ever had. Now give the reviewers OCD and an extra 30 IQ points. And every single code change has to live up to this standard. That's what it has to do with this.
> The brittleness and difficult of writing the code. The extra complexity. The cost of bugs. And ease of creating performance degradations. If you are even asking that question, you probably don't have the experience to even have an opinion on this.
You didn't express anything unique to systems engineering.
What do you mean, "No"? Letting an LLM loose on Postgres is exactly what happened here: https://malisper.me/pgrust-rebuilding-postgres-in-rust-with-...
So, keyword 'rational', I'm not sure any sufficiently large company is a rational actor.
Yes, at [tech corp dayjob], any dependency is likely to be banned for arbitrary reasons if you bring it to the attention of the wrong people. It doesn't have to go against any of our policies e.g. don't mention anything with GPL in the name around the "risk" people. In fact, do not ever talk to the "risk" people and hope they don't talk to you.
Latest news: Apparently, devtools are a legal risk. Basic reverse-engineering of client-side JS is now banned.
The delusions really seem to scale with headcount.
Good news, we now know up front what an independent port would cost, and it’s not much. So no reason AWS, Google, and friends couldn’t bang out their own port if they want, binary-compatible with this one.
What we don’t know for sure is whether there is any copyright for LLM-generated code. The license might be irrelevant!
2 commits in the repo both generated by claude. This is AI slop, I wonder where you see good momentum?
4K stargazers in a week.
main indeed has two commits, but it clearly states the location of the rest of the commits, so I wouldn't be critical of main itself.
Now we see https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/tree/v0.2 has almost 6000 commits in it, with the very first one on 2026-07-02. That's a lot of token momentum!It's easy to claim AI slop nowadays, but you should still mistrust-but-verify.
What's the reason for it? Does not make a lot of sense to keep all the commits elsewhere
It's a reference to the prompt that found a counterexample to the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture
> "do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample"
What do we mean by "easy to claim"? It is written by AI. The 6000 commits are by Claude.
Everything around Rust is political, so the license choices are also about political statement.
Most official Rust projects are dual MIT/Apache licensed by convention [1] (and most Rust libraries from third parties I've seen that are open source MIT follow the MIT/Apache dual license), so seems like this library shouldn't just be AGPL for a typical political choice of a Rustacean?
[1]: https://rust-lang.org/policies/licenses/
official projects are usually run by sensible people who want to do things and aren't leading with ideology.
We're literally talking about an "X but in Rust" project already...