131–140 of 290 posts
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You can put any license on your software that you want, but a license that required revenue sharing wouldn't really count as "open source".
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I believe the correct term for those licenses is "shared source" not open source.
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The $100MM Revenue License... Once your company surpasses $100MM in revenue you have to negotiate licensing terms.
How many engineers can be paid from $100MM revenue?[0] The *aaS company might be better served by employing engineering team to maintain their fork/API-compatible clean-room implementation a-la Amazon Aurora. 0. If company is profitable and licensing costs > overall salaries + monetary value of controlling roadmap.
It’s interesting to see the mindset over here at HN change over the year. I recall when MongoDB introduced their “commons clause”, RedisLabs did the relicensing and ElasticSearch doing the dual license open source code, there was quite some outrage over here. I guess everyone is accepting that these clouds are in fact major threats to these projects, as providing these databases as a service is pretty much the only r…
Discussion fatigue is a thing.
Even 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.
Stealing an open source project would be like saying stealing quick sort. You can't steal something if it was given to the public domain.
Most open source projects are not given to the public domain, but encumbered with clauses in the form of their license.
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.
They already have - Amazon has Aurora, which has MySQL and Postgres compatibility. I'm sure if there's enough demand, Amazon will add CockroadDB compatibility to Aurora in the not-too-distant future.
Which lags behind upstream in versioning and has its own quirks.
Or Redshift, which is still stuck in Postgres 8 and absolutely has its own quirks.
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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…
>, but it may be interesting to create a new license to protect against this for new OSS projects. Well, you also have to take the game theory of incentives into account. Let's say you develop a new database called NextGenCockroachDB with a required 30% royalty license. That type of license will alter the behavior of people evaluating it and may very well prevent it from being adopted at all. If there's no critical m…
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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.
Not sure why they changed their license then. Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB?
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, gre…
Making a project that was Open Source, not Open Source anymore, is hardly a "good move". I mean, it might be a good financial move for Cockroach and their VC's, but I have a hard time seeing it as good for the world in general.
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…
That's a really extreme way to think about this.
Consider this example: I lose 1 Utility Point for every new provider I need to contract with, set up monitoring for, set up billing etc. This balloons to losing 2 UP if that provider's in a different public cloud, but since many let you choose an AWS region, this is probably not a problem. I gain 5 UP from using Cockroach, because it saves me engineering time. And I gain 1 additional UP from using latest Cockroach because they're making real optimization breakthroughs.
So pre-license-change, AWS Cockroach that tracks the latest release might net 6 UP, and Cockroach Cloud run by the company might only net 5 UP because of that cost of a new provider.
But post-license change, Cockroach Cloud would be tied, because now I'm comparing the cost of a new provider against the cost of latest developments. And every single blog post I see about Cockroach developments pushes me in that direction.
It's a really great move, though kind of a loss to open source. I wish the Cockroach folks the best.
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, gre…
Making a project that was Open Source, not Open Source anymore, is hardly a "good move". I mean, it might be a good financial move for Cockroach and their VC's, but I have a hard time seeing it as good for the world in general.