CuriouslyC 10 hours ago

Seriously. The amount of lift a SaaS product needs to give me is insane for me to even bother evaluating it, and there's a near zero percent chance I'll use it in my core.

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  • esseph 2 hours ago

    I really feel like we're heading down the slope of a large section of the internet dieing off, and if that happens I think it may fracture even more than it already has globally.

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  • kcb 9 hours ago

    Especially a product that demands access to large quantities of your most sensitive data to be useful.

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HEmanZ 9 hours ago

What do you think an alternative is for someone who:

1. Has a technical system they think could be worth a fortune to large enterprises, containing at least a few novel insights to the industry.

2. Knows that competitors and open source alternatives could copy/implement these in a year or so if the product starts off open source.

3. Has to put food on the table and doesn’t want to give massive corporations extremely valuable software for free.

Open source has its place, but it is IMO one of the ways to give monopolies massive value for free. There are plenty of open source alternatives around for vector DBs. Do we (developers) need to give everything away to the rich

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  • mhuffman 8 hours ago

    Traditionally the most profitable approach is offering enterprise support and consulting.

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    • cluckindan 8 hours ago

      Enterprises are so very fond of choosing novel open source technologies, too!

      (not)

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      • gloomyday 7 hours ago

        I have been working for 4 years with "enterprise" software, and I feel like the whole field is some kind of collective insanity.

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  • OutOfHere 6 hours ago

    Let's say the best open source product has a feature score of 70/100, and the best closed source product has a feature score of 85/100, and this is me being generous with the latter. The issue is that just by being closed source, it immediately loses 20/100, bringing its score to 65/100, which is below the open offering. A closed source product carries substantial risk if the company behind it were to stop maintaining it, which is why the adjustment by -20 applies.

    Secondly, as I know, the blocker with approximate neighbor search is often not insertion, but search. And if this search was worth a fortune to me, I'd simply embarrassingly parallelize it on CPUs or on GPUs.

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hungarianhc 9 hours ago

Not that locked in - you can just move your vectors to another platform, no?

Vectroid co-founder here. We're huge fans of open source. My co-founder, Talip, made Hazelcast, which is open source.

It might make sense to open source all or part of Vectroid at some point in the future, but at the moment, we feel that would slow us down.

I hate vendor lock-in just as much as the next person. I believe data portability is the ACTUAL counter to vendor lock-in. If we have clean APIs to get your data in, get your data out, and the ability to bulk export your data (which we need to implement soon!), then there's less of a concern, in my opinion.

I also totally understand and respect that some people only want open source software. I'm certainly like that w/ my homelab setup! Except for Plex... Love Plex... Usually.

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stronglikedan 10 hours ago

Nothing for you to see here. Surely you just aren't their target customer.

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  • OutOfHere 10 hours ago

    So who is? Who really needs to index 1 billion new vectors every 48 minutes, or perhaps equivalently 1 million new vectors every 3 seconds?

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    • hansvm 8 hours ago

      If HNSW were accurate enough (and if this DB were much faster) then I'd have a use case. I wound up going down a different route to create a differentiable database for ML shenanigans though.

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