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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#161

Post by manigandham »

anderspitman wrote: post #158
manigandham wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, that sounds like an excuse.

The APIs are all public. The company can build whatever integrations they want to offer. For example, many already use EC2, VPCs, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, etc. to extend their databases into a client's architecture, and it's no different than what AWS provides.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#162

Post by DannyBee »

btown wrote: post #139
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…

> 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. 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 lo…

"That's a really extreme way to think about this."

I would argue this is probably how most CTO's think about it unless forced at gunpoint to do otherwise.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#163

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Is the hosted service going to have the global network of data centers that the generic cloud provider has? What are the chances that the unprofitable maintainer is going to stay in business? If they are acquired, what are the chances that the acquirer is going to run the service well and not just kill it?

Seeing that neither Redis Labs nor Mongo are profitable, they haven’t quite “figured it out.”

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#164

Post by matthewaveryusa »

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…

You're completely missing the point. The point isn't to stop AWS from integrating. The point is to get a slice of the pie if AWS does decide to do an integration because now, with the new license, AWS needs to come to them first and ask for a license, which I'm sure they would give with reasonable terms.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#165

Post by ForHackernews »

dantheman wrote: post #154
gonehome wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most developers would prefer a 30% cut of profits, not a 30% liability of costs, I'd assume.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#166

Post by manigandham »

scarface74 wrote: post #163
manigandham wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the hosted service going to have the global network of data centers that the generic cloud provider has? What are the chances that the unprofitable maintainer is going to stay in business? If they are acquired, what are the chances that the acquirer is going to run the service well and not just kill it? Seeing that neither Redis Labs nor Mongo are profitable, they haven’t quite “figured it out.”

They're offerings run on the same clouds, often within your own cloud account or peered to it. They're providing a managed version of their software product, not building a cloud from scratch.

Vendor management is a different issue. There's always a risk but if you cant trust any companies smaller than AWS then none of this applies anyway.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#167

Post by manigandham »

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…

Exactly, customers want services that solve problems, not software that they have to operate.

Clients rarely care what backend is actually running, which is why the clouds can offer the same APIs like Postgres and MongoDB backed by their own custom software.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#168

Post by manigandham »

napsterbr wrote: post #15
makkesk8 wrote: post #11

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…

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?

CockroachDB is a proprietary database built in Go using RocksDB for the storage layer. It just uses the PostgreSQL protocol so it's compatible with existing drivers and applications but the underlying tech is entirely different.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#169

Post by thanatos_dem »

ansible wrote: post #28
napsterbr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

CRDB is compatible with the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use existing database drivers (in C#, Golang, whatever) to talk to a CRDB instance. The SQL itself is slightly different (no two databases are the same these days), so that would have to be adjusted. If your backup solution is fine with "SELECT * FROM table1; SELECT * FROM table2; ..." you can use the client interface for backups. But usually you want t…

> But usually you want to a snapshot of the entire database at some (self-consistent!) point in time

This is actually super simple to do in Cockroach, as it supports time travel queries - https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/time-travel-queries-selec...

So you can run a script at, say, 12:05 AM every morning, saving the table state “AS OF SYSTEM TIME 12:00” (simplifying syntax). And thereby get a fully consistent snapshot of all tables, as long as your backup script takes less time to execute than the configured table TTLs

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#170

Post by michaelt »

mcphage wrote: post #66
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…

> 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.

That, and if it was going well they wouldn't have relicensed.

Just like parachutists who open their reserve chute suffer more injuries than ones who don't :)

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