Relicensing CockroachDB

Post by anderspitman » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #161

anderspitman wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by SEJeff » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 10:13 PM UTC

jeena wrote: post #151

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 10:16 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #76

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.

> if you want to gain mainstream acceptance for your database product They've been around for several years and have had millions of dollars in funding. If you're going to argue that their name is holding them back from mainstream acceptance, first you should establish that they don't already have that.

Post by senderista » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #100

quotemstr wrote: post #52

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.

3) The cloud provider forks at the version under the previous license, continues to iterate on it by adding valuable features that are exposed to users, which the OSS version won't have, and now the OSS vendor is playing both marketplace & technical catch-up at the same time and with each reinforcing the downside of the other. Effectively forcing original innovator into the position of being a fast-follower.

Post by akulkarni » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

bdarnell wrote: post #31

bdarnell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

I'd like to thank our friends at TimescaleDB for the idea to use schema control as the dividing line (they're doing the same thing in their license)