I finally got some traction on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299659

The best comments are truly unparalleled. One of them brought my attention to Manticore, specifically their GitHub search demo that does something very similar to SemHub. Follow the link to see the open source code as well as the blog posts. Truly impressive.

Their purpose is different from mine; they intend to exhibit the capabilities of their underlying search database. Honestly, the tech looks really good, MySQL-compatibility and a huge range of search-related features one can only dream of.

I suspect it’s hard for them to take off because:

• The industry has strongly converged on a few standard relational databases (Postgres, MySQL, maybe SQLite), and a few “niche” databases. Though, I wonder with the rise of LLMs, whether there may be an opportunity here…?
• Their license is GPL, which may make it harder for other companies to build upon them, since not everyone wants to do copyleft. I guess I come from the school of programmers where MIT license is the “real open source”. I can see why GPL might work for apps. But for infra, it’s probably better to go with a BSL license, if the worry is that Amazon might take it and turn it into a managed service.
• And this last point I think is key: as an app developer, I would like to have a managed service to take away these complexities for me.