2025-01-13 - KDB Project Call Meeting Minutes

[alvin-c-shih]

Date

Monday, January 13, 2025 - 9:30am ET / 2:30pm UK

// Second Monday of every month

Attendees

Fullname	Affiliation	GitHub Username
Karl Moll	FINOS	@karlmoll
Alvin Shih	Morgan Stanley	@alvin-c-shih
Peter Gyorok	KX Systems	@gyorokpeter
Aaron Davies	Morgan Stanley	@adavies42
Ross Duffy	Morgan Stanley	@rdffy
Connor Gervin	KX Systems	@Connor-Gervin
Rian Ó Cuinneagáin	KX Systems	@rianoc
Gary Davies	Data Intellect	@drgdavies

Meeting notices

• FINOS Project leads are responsible for observing the FINOS guidelines for running project meetings. Project maintainers can find additional resources in the FINOS Maintainers Cheatsheet.

• All participants in FINOS project meetings are subject to the LF Antitrust Policy, the FINOS Community Code of Conduct and all other FINOS policies.

• FINOS meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of FINOS and the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws. Please contact legal@finos.org with any questions.

• FINOS project meetings may be recorded for use solely by the FINOS team for administration purposes. In very limited instances, and with explicit approval, recordings may be made more widely available.

Agenda

• (5 min) Convene, roll call, welcome new people.

• Display FINOS Antitrust Policy summary slide

• Review Meeting Notices (see above)

• (5 min) Approve previous meeting minutes.

  • Approved by acclamation.

• (10 min) Concerns about open source benefiting consumers / repackagers more than the producers.

  • High-profile examples of projects moving to less permissive open source licenses.
    • https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-mongodbs-turn-to-change-its-open-source-license/
      • "Clearly, the change is directed at cloud platform providers who package their own managed offerings of MongoDB as a service. That means you, IBM Cloud, Scalegrid, and ObjectRocket."
    • https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws
      • "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
    • https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/redis_changes_license/
      • "These changes reflect the FOSS community's growing desperation at trying to make open source pay, which has even led to developers sabotaging their own code. Others stop offering free community support, while some are attempting sponsorship approaches."
  • Jo Shinonome better able to protect his IP by keeping it closed:
    • 2024-12-16 - KDB Project Call Meeting Minutes #114 (comment)
  • FINOS still to opine on whether PyKX is really "dual licensed".
  • Banks unwilling to adopt code with non-permissive licenses since the cost of proving compliance is too high.
    • Llama v2 license allows up to "700 million monthly active users".
      • https://ai.meta.com/llama/license/
      • But what regulated organization would welcome outsiders to poke around their systems in order to prove compliance?
        • Could result in leak of MNPI.
  • PyKX team looking at factoring the repo so that the part that's open clearly separated from the part that's not.
    • In game software, game engine may have one license whereas game assets may have another.
  • Some of the posters on LinkedIn might want to consider revisiting the history of "open source" vs "source available "software.
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
  • Hard to come up with examples of small companies that successfully monetized permissively-licensed code.

• (20 min) KX Reimagining?

  • https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kx-systems_kdb-activity-7283132437633630210-Ry5w
    • What is up with using "Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols" code block for bold text?!
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols
      • Problematic for: accessibility, indexing, copy-pasting into Emacs, etc.
      • But it seems it's a common hack to work around lack of formatting capability in LinkedIn.
      • Would be good if LinkedIn supported Markdown.
    • https://kx.com/blog/embracing-a-new-era-kdb-unleashed-for-everyone/
    • A free Community Edition: Unlocking access for everyone with no
      commercial restrictions, encouraging exploration and innovation.
    • A brand new developer experience: Featuring interactive documentation,
      community-driven guides, and tools that make learning and building with
      kdb+ seamless.
    • Enhanced compatibility: Supporting open file formats and common data
      frameworks to fit effortlessly into your existing workflows.
    • Collaborative open-source modules: Accelerating innovation with
      reference libraries and contributions from a growing global community.
    • Optimized package management: Making it easier than ever to extend and
      scale kdb+ for any use case.
  • Has a lot of what Ryan Hamilton was seeking:
    • https://www.timestored.com/b/kdb-5-0-the-roadmap-ahead/
  • Current "Personal Edition" must have online connection and non for commercial use.
    • 24 cores. No memory limit.
    • Free edition from 2019.03.06 was 32-bit and limited to 4 GB of memory.
    • Upcoming "Community Edition" can be used commercially?!
  • Various Module Loader ideas from days past:
    • Module versioning.
    • Namespace rules of engagement.
    • Boost-like proving ground.
    • .z.F to give the path as passed to \l as opposed to real path from `.z.f'
    • Search path for \l.
    • Examples of module loader for Docker images as well as native OS.
    • Support for various mixtures of OS, compiler, struct k0.

• (5 min) AOB, Q&A, Adjourn.

Decisions Made

• Decision 1
• Decision 2
• ...

Action Items

• Action 1
• Action 2
• ...

Join Zoom Meeting

• https://zoom.us/j/94523415326?pwd=NkJDaUtUUlZTcHVwcUJHdG0yRFJUdz09
• Meeting ID: 945 2341 5326
• Passcode: 361990
• Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abTtYRZ0B6

[gyorokpeter]

Péter Györök / KX

[adavies42]

Aaron Davies/Morgan Stanley

[drgdavies]

Gary Davies /Data Intellect

[karlmoll]

Karl Moll / FINOS

[rdffy]

Ross Duffy / Morgan Stanley

[rianoc-kx]

Rian Ó Cuinneagáin / KX

[ConnorGervin]

Connor Gervin / KX

[gyorokpeter]

https://typegrow.com/tools/linkedin-text-formatter

[rianoc-kx]

https://typegrow.com/tools/linkedin-text-formatter

I tested and this outputs the same mathematical Unicode characters to get the bold/italic styles.

[alvin-c-shih]

Alvin Shih / Morgan Stanley