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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#61

Post by amenod »

Hm, wasn't one of the conditions to use BSL (the name of the license) that one of the "Change licenses" must be GPL?

I remember distinctly because while I liked BSL, I never understood why I couldn't use AGPL as fallback (which would be much better suited to my use case).

EDIT: It seems I was wrong:

> To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version. Licensor may specify additional Change Licenses without limitation.

https://mariadb.com/bsl11/

So Apache is OK, because such software can be incorporated into GPL app. AGPL is not, because it places additional restrictions.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#62

Post by TAForObvReasons »

j88439h84 wrote: post #46
DannyBee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. (And this was even a similar kind of disintermediation applied to authors as you see…

Is there a way to encourage AWS/GCP to contract major project maintainers for support? For example, could GCP set up a platform where maintainers of Postgres, Redis, ..., could sign up to be paid monthly, and perhaps to prioritize GCP issues when doing maintenance? This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these…

Cockroach Labs took $53M in VC: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs

For the scale of the required exit, they would need a very large support contract, and at that point it would be easier for Google / Amazon to just build their own solution, hire their own people to provide support and development, or just let market forces do their thing.

The fundamental shift now is that a lot of open source software is on shaky ground, having been built by VC money searching a profit. This is the same force plaguing NPM and the JS community. The piper must be paid at any cost, even if it means compromising the open source part of the project

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#63

Post by didibus »

Could someone say just take a normal open source license, like MIT, and just add a provision saying, if you are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, this license doesn't apply to you and you are not permitted to use the code in any way?

Basically, just blacklist certain companies that compete with you directly.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#64

Post by k__ »

I had the impression cloud providers like AWS would move to using their own core services to emulate other systems and not host the original thing.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#66

Post by mcphage »

DannyBee wrote: post #35
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…

The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. (And this was even a similar kind of disintermediation applied to authors as you see…

> One interesting constant is that most of the projects that felt a need to change licensing to react to business model issues over the years are dead ;) . Not all of them, mind you. But the failure rate seems really really high.

The failure rate for all projects is pretty high, though.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#67

Post by TAForObvReasons »

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…

The outrage is mostly driven by companies that took millions in VC money. VC-fueled open source would always need to find a way to monetize, and "bait and switch" by changing licenses is a tried and true strategy.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#68

Post by amenod »

didibus wrote: post #63

Could someone say just take a normal open source license, like MIT, and just add a provision saying, if you are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, this license doesn't apply to you and you are not permitted to use the code in any way? Basically, just blacklist certain companies that compete with you directly.

It's still not free/open/libre source anymore, because you are discriminating against someone, so it's not in-line with the set of freedoms as defined by both OSI and FSF.

Whether this matters to you or not is another question, of course... :)

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#69

Post by jasonlotito »

api wrote: post #41
JoshTriplett wrote: post #32

And one more database removes itself from the Open Source community, and disqualifies itself as a dependency of other open projects.

So the open source community is about giving free labor to Amazon? I've been an OSS user and contributor since the middle 1990s and I very much welcome these moves. SaaS has been getting a free (in the unfair sense) ride without contributing in any way.

No, the open source community is not about giving free labor to Amazon. But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about members of the open source community taking free labor from the community and then pulling back on the open source promise. As someone in the same boat, I'd hate to see a project I contributed to change it's license to something that limits how the applications can be used. If something is licensed as MIT, I expect it to stay MIT.

Furthermore, the presumption that users of the software are now required to contribute back flies in the face of the agreement.

I'm not against people using a license like this. It does however seems a slap in the face to change the license after benefiting from the fact that you are releasing an open source product.

tl;dr: It's a bait and switch, and dislike it.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#70

Post by amenod »

didibus wrote: post #60

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 s…

The way I understand it, the whole idea of this relicensing is that you can no longer take someone else's work and build your business competing with them. So no, you can't do that. Seems fair enough to me.
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