It's a good move and I even welcome it. However, I would have loved to see the removal of their enterprise version of the product at the same time.
I love cockroachdb to death, but the key features that prevent me from using it in any real projects I'm doing are the backup/restore feature, which is currently locked behind their enterprise version. I also would love to use CDC and table partitioning.
Nevertheless, great product.
Relicensing CockroachDB
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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#12This is pretty interesting, I'm thinking about how edge cases will be handled. Consider a product like Airtable: at present I think most people would classify it as a consumer productivity tool. Firebase on the other end would be a platform as a service. Airtable is adding features that make it more of a platform as a service. I wonder where the line will be drawn for the new BSL.
(Cockroach Labs founder)
The details are in the "additional usage grant" clause: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028c...
We decided to draw the line at whether the end user has direct control over table schemas. If users can specify the schema to be used, it's a database service and needs a license. If you're fitting everything into a generic schema (even if the user can specify things that look like new columns in the UI), it's an application and doesn't need a special license.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#13Recently discussed with somebody at a major cloud provider and IIRC their response was in essence “I think we’re doing them a favor: ask Neo4j about our release of [hosted graph database service]. We’ve taken a share of their business, but the overall market is much bigger, and they’re doing great. Our hosted products are not even the most polished in the market, and companies like Elastic can easily be compete with…
Yes, some cloud providers readily suggest competing with them by making something better. In the end, the DB is still running on their infrastructure (required to keep the customer's latency low) and they are still capturing profit even if it is not as much as their DBaaS profit.
There is a problem though that a DBaaS provider is still at an inherent disadvantage. You aren't in the AWS/GCP cli tool and APIs. And the DBaaS has to setup VPC peering across accounts, which has some inherit limitations (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP).
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#14This is more validation of the threat that cloud providers (mainly AWS) are to businesses built around open source products. Yes, AWS and others are legally permitted by existing open source licenses to create SaaS versions of these open source products, but with cloud computing becoming an increasingly winner-take-all market, it leaves little room for the software's authors to generate revenue via hosted offerings o…
It'd be interesting if there was a way to specifically require AWS, Azure, Google Cloud (or more generally any cloud hosting reseller) to pay if they use the open source software or any derivative of it (or if they create any company which then uses it) for the purposes of reselling it to others.
Basically give the open source project a 30% cut if you're going to resell it (or fork and resell it). It might be hard to do now since with AWS since with ES Amazon just forked whatever version was already permissively licensed, but it may be interesting to create a new license to protect against this for new OSS projects.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#15It's a good move and I even welcome it. However, I would have loved to see the removal of their enterprise version of the product at the same time. I love cockroachdb to death, but the key features that prevent me from using it in any real projects I'm doing are the backup/restore feature, which is currently locked behind their enterprise version. I also would love to use CDC and table partitioning. Nevertheless, gre…
Never used CRDB so this question may make no sense, but given it builds upon Postgres (AFAIU), couldn't you use any of the many backup solutions Pg offers?
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#16Recently discussed with somebody at a major cloud provider and IIRC their response was in essence “I think we’re doing them a favor: ask Neo4j about our release of [hosted graph database service]. We’ve taken a share of their business, but the overall market is much bigger, and they’re doing great. Our hosted products are not even the most polished in the market, and companies like Elastic can easily be compete with…
Sure. Amazon Neptune is garbage, but that's not the issue. They are competing fair and square here. The problem is when they fork completely.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#17Recently discussed with somebody at a major cloud provider and IIRC their response was in essence “I think we’re doing them a favor: ask Neo4j about our release of [hosted graph database service]. We’ve taken a share of their business, but the overall market is much bigger, and they’re doing great. Our hosted products are not even the most polished in the market, and companies like Elastic can easily be compete with…
Years ago I heard the same from a Postgres-contractor friend who said amazons ready-to-go (now RDS, but iirc, back then just MySQL; I don’t recall the service brand name - maybe also RDS) SQL service was welcome, because it sucked. Its not clear to me though that 1) it would stay “sucky” 2) users would make the distinction my friend did.
I’m worried it’d play out where Amazon would vacuum up the “low end” part of the market and the “high end” would further have to be competed for, because Joes Expert RDBMS Service v Amazon.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#18Even if cloud providers give back more than they take, there nothing legally stopping them from stealing an open source project as their own. The Business Source License (BSL) seems like a good reaction. What Amazon did to confluent.io and so many others seems pretty cold hearted.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#19Unrelated, but it never occurred to me that cockroachdb and gimp were made by the same persons ! Kudos ! (If I'm not mistaken)
Wow you're right, I just looked it up. Very nice!
Something that came as a surprise to me was the fact that QEMU and FFMpeg are made by the same guy as well.
Kind of depressing; either one of those projects has that person set for life in the job market, and that jerk has both! How am I supposed to compete with that?
EDIT: Just a note, I say this with all the love in the world, and certainly wish no ill-will towards Fabrice. I hope my dumb joke above didn't come off as hostile...I think it's pretty cool that one person was able to build two apps that I use daily.
Re: Relicensing CockroachDB
#20> The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. How much a SaaS has to do to not be consider as selling CockroachDB as is? These questions apart is worth noting that AWS can still copy CockroachDB APIs, rename it AWS Ants, and called it a day.
The "API" you are referring to is known as SQL, transmitted over the wire using the pgsql protocol. There's nothing to copy. The magic of Cockroach is in the implementation.