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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#151

Post by jeena »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #62
j88439h84 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

I agree with that and it is one of the main reasons why I personally don't care for Open Source and make a huge distinction between it and Free Software.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#152

Post by erichocean »

I really like this company, and their developers. Solid tech vision and the actual tech chops to pull it off.

I don't like the drama that seems to surround it.

This post is just one more vote in the "this company has a lot of drama associated with it", and that to me is always a giant blinking warning sign.

Without knowing anything about them (though I do), at this point, I would bet this company flames out eventually, fails to get further funding, and institutes yet another license change to milk the dying cow while the talent flees for greeter pastures. Best case they get acquired by Microsoft, worst case Oracle (I'm sure their users would love that). Or just fade away.

Anyway, my $0.02. I hope I'm wrong.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#153

Post by IMTDb »

bdarnell wrote: post #120
gtirloni wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc). For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really n…

> if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. Cockroach Labs is not your only option; you can also use other providers that have a license agreement with us. Our first partner in this area is ObjectRocket: https://www.objectrocket.com/blog/cockroachdb/introducing_co...

Quick question : my company uses a "devops as a service" partner. Basically we pay a monthly fee to have their guys on call 24/7 in case something starts to go wrong. Additionally they update and manage our kubernetes cluster, installing and setuping any dependency we require. From our point of view, we have a fully managed kubernetes cluster.

Financially, we pay AWS for EC2 instances and other expenses + them on top of that for consulting service, they have root access to the cluster. We do not have any devops/infra guy in the office.

Would they be allowed to install (and manage) CockroachDB on our cluster if we need to ?

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#154

Post by dantheman »

gonehome wrote: post #14
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…

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…

A 30% cut of what? The core costs are in the deployment of the servers, network, security, management, etc.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#155

Post by dantheman »

stingraycharles wrote: post #110

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…

I don't think people think it's a good idea, it's just that: 1. CockroachDB isn't nearly a prolific as Elastic/Redis/Mongo 2. There's not much new to say that hasn't already been said

So people don't care as much, less impact, less outrage.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#156

Post by merb »

gregwebs wrote: post #13
louis-paul wrote: post #6

Recently 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…

> (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP)

actually you do not need DNS resolution on GCP since you can actually have a high available IP way easier (which is way better). in AWS it's also possible to have a highly available IP, but it's way harder to do so.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#157

Post by manigandham »

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 disagree. Services are worth far more than software. That's what cloud/SaaS is all about. AWS is rising to meet the demand by customers paying lots of money to have their problems solved, not worry about software licenses and operations.

I trust the creator to run a hosted service better than a generic cloud provider, but most don't which is a failure of their own making. A few companies like Redis Labs and MongoDB have figured this out but most are still stuck writing code when customers are asking for managed services. I don't know why they don't adapt.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#158

Post by anderspitman »

manigandham wrote: post #157
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 disagree. Services are worth far more than software. That's what cloud/SaaS is all about. AWS is rising to meet the demand by customers paying lots of money to have their problems solved, not worry about software licenses and operations. I trust the creator to run a hosted service better than a generic cloud provider, but most don't which is a failure of their own making. A few companies like Redis Labs and MongoDB…

The article specifically mentioned that the integrations AWS can offer between services simply cannot be competed with by any single company, no matter how good that company makes their own hosted product.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#159

Post by Xylakant »

sangnoir wrote: post #89
OJFord wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. > No license change will fix that. Well, perhaps not a licence change , but if it's good enough that it's The One the provider wants, but it can't offer it under the terms of the licence, then paying for it under a separate licence could…

Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward. Maintaining API/wire-protocol compatibility isn't that hard for large tech companies these licenses are trying to battle. I don't think these open source companies are not aware of the risk of forkin…

> Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward

e.g. AWS creating OpenDistro for Elasticsearch and adding core elastic stack functionality for free (Auth/TLS/Alerting) by integrating and adapting existing OS components.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#160

Post by gregwebs »

eblanshey wrote: post #111
gtirloni wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc). For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really n…

> my only option is Cockroach Labs. Their new license doesn't forbid others from offering a managed service. It simply requires the managed provider to pay them for a license. AWS, GCP, etc can still create a managed service.

It is a high risk business model to be entirely dependent on negotiating a license with a single vendor that you are competing against. For MongoDB there are vendors that will keep offering managed MongoDB. I talked with one that is open-sourcing their deployment as required by the MongoDB license. I suspect that no companies will start a new hosted MongoDB offering based on purchasing a commercial license from MongoDB and we already saw the biggest alternative MongoDB provider merge with MongoDB.
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