The reason you make anything open source is adoption. You wanna build something which a lot companies, a lot of people, are going to base their entire tech stack upon (in this case a database). They [need to] trust you with their data. They wanna be able to look at the code and make sure that the codebase is good quality, it doesn’t have any weird bugs, and they’re able to modify the code. If the [software provider] company dies tomorrow, they should still be able to adopt that codebase, and maybe run with it.

When you make something proprietary, the selling becomes a lot more work. You need to have an entire sales team to be able to go to individual companies and be like “Hey, have you heard about this thing called Dgraph? It’s a proprietary thing, you can’t see it online, but we can sell it to you for use”.

It’s a much harder pitch than: “Hey developers. It’s free. It’s out there. You can try it. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. If you like it, it’s fine. You don’t have to talk to us. And I think that is the beauty of open source. It avoids having to have sales people running around. And you just become part of a developer conversation anywhere in the world. No-one has to pay you to try it.