Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 290 posts

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#51

Post by dhd415 »

tdb7893 wrote: post #37
dhd415 wrote: post #4

This 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…

I think from a practical perspective this makes sense but having to change their licenses makes me sad. I don't want to see licenses change from "you can do whatever you want with this" to "you can do whatever you want with this unless you are competing with us".

To be fair, they're forbidding only one specific form of competition- managed hosting. Forking, embedding, etc., are all still permitted.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#52

Post by quotemstr »

So they're taking their product proprietary. They're not the first to try this move. They won't be the last. It never works.

This change guarantees one of two outcomes: 1) CockroachDB becomes irrelevant, as cloud providers stop providing it, or 2) a FOSS implementation of CockroachDB's API (perhaps based on the last FOSS CockroachDB release) becomes dominant.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#53

Post by sbuttgereit »

makapuf wrote: post #2

Unrelated, but it never occurred to me that cockroachdb and gimp were made by the same persons ! Kudos ! (If I'm not mistaken)

Over in PostgreSQLand ... Tom Lane is an important member of the PostgreSQL core team and also was involved in the PNG image format (and other graphics related efforts).

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#55

Post by amenod »

bdarnell wrote: post #12
chuckgreenman wrote: post #3

This 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 lo…

Genius! Very clear line!

I wish you all the luck on this endeavour, I really believe the time has come to move a bit away from strict open-source.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#56

Post by dhuramas »

xwdv wrote: post #50

I’m still not sure why people open source great products then get outraged that someone else would simply resell the product and make money off of it, possibly even more than them. When I put something out as open source, I’m doing it fully aware that I am leaving money on the table, but it will be worth it if a community of maintainers springs up around the project and ends up making it far better and more useful th…

Does that mean we shouldn't revisit our decisions and all your decisions should be set in stone?

CockroachDB tried something. It seems to not be working- so they are changing. It's not as if they are doing it retroactively.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#57

Post by tus87 »

> or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service

Great so I will write a little shim that loads libcockroach and call it TermiteDB and I'm set.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#58

Post by tus87 »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #53
makapuf wrote: post #2

Unrelated, but it never occurred to me that cockroachdb and gimp were made by the same persons ! Kudos ! (If I'm not mistaken)

Over in PostgreSQLand ... Tom Lane is an important member of the PostgreSQL core team and also was involved in the PNG image format (and other graphics related efforts).

Yeah well the guy who wrote qemu also did ffmpeg.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#59

Post by karlding »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Maybe a good time to change the name as well? Funny names are cute and all but if you want to gain mainstream acceptance for your database product CockroachDB is not the one I would have picked. Downvoters: if you think names for products do not matter you are mistaken.

Maybe you should use BikeshedDB [0] instead?

[0] https://github.com/tschottdorf/bikesheddb

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#60

Post by didibus »

I'm all for businesses coming up with whatever licensing terms they want. That said, as a user, it'll be a harder sell if I can't easily understand or validate what the license permits and doesn't.

For example, with their new license, could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? Or what if I'm not offering cockroachDB as a service directly, but the service I'm building and offering as a service can still be argued to be some sort of data-store?

Post reply on HN