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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#181

Post by kelnos »

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…

> 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.

There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. And Amazon/Google/etc. still really wants to offer hosted CockroachDB, they can purchase a license, which helps fund development, and would probably be a financial rounding error to an outfit like AWS.

> Unless something comes along that is "better enough" that people are willing to buck AWS to use it, this approach of relicensing fails.

> (and the customers certainly don't care about your licensing scheme)

I think you're misinterpreting how this license works and what it actually restricts, or you've overestimated the number of users this will affect. Most customers don't have to care; for the common use ("I want to install CockroachDB on AWS/GCP/my own server and use it as a data store for my product"), the licensing change is immaterial and they can use the software in the same way as they could when it was Apache-licensed.

The only way this backfires is if Amazon creates a clean-room CockroachDB workalike and offers it as a hosted service. Even then, it's not a slam dunk: for example, I'd very much prefer to run redis myself on bare EC2 instances than use AWS ElastiCache, as the latter just generally doesn't meet my availability requirements. I've also once migrated a service from redis to DynamoDB and had a terrible experience during and after, so switching to a theoretical workalike isn't without its costs and risks.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#182

Post by mindcrime »

mcms wrote: post #140
mindcrime wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the world in general, indeed, it is better than having a dead or hardly-maintained project (which needs financial incentives from project owners). Don't you agree?

I don't really think increasing the world's stock of proprietary software is something to laud. Still, with their "switch to Apache after 3 years", I guess that this is still, on balance, better than nothing.

What I reject is the idea that the only choices are "make this kind of switch" OR "having a dead or hardly-maintained project". Sounds a bit "fallacy of the excluded middle" to me. But they have the right to license their thing however they want, so what right do any of us really have to complain. I just find it frustrating to see people retreating from an Open Source position given my own deeply rooted ideological bias towards F/OSS.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#183

Post by kelnos »

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…

There's another angle to it post-license-change: AWS Cockroach continues tracking the latest release and pays a licensing fee for the privilege of doing so. Your costs to use it might go up a tiny amount, but AWS would likely eat most of it, and, bonus: CockroachDB's development gets more funding.

It's hard to put a price tag on knowing that an open source project your business depends on is well-funded enough that it's unlikely to disappear or be difficult to support.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#184

Post by mcphage »

jacquesm wrote: post #175
mcphage wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If funding was a measure of success Theranos would be A-ok.

who said anything about success? Or are you arguing that Theranos’s name held it back from mainstream acceptance? Otherwise, why did you bring it up?

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#185

Post by _msw_ »

senderista wrote: post #172
manigandham wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One difference is that AWS etc. can run software on bare metal if they want. (I suspect they are doing just that with their hosted Kafka offering.) Even with the new EC2 bare metal instances, I don’t think you could roll your own for a competitive price (IME packet.net is much cheaper than EC2 for on-demand bare metal, with a much better UX).

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka runs on EC2.

Disclosure: I build EC2.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#186

Post by mfreed »

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)

Thanks, @bdarnell!

We at TimescaleDB spent a lot of time thinking about how to best express this dividing line in a manner concretely understandable by engineers. Glad to see others starting to take a similar approach.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#187

Post by alexland »

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…

Doesn't seem reasonable to compare how you feel about open sourcing personal projects to open source software that a company builds and relies on for revenue. Open source is amazing because it allows all of us to share knowledge and build things better than any of us could build individually, and I LOVE that. When a goliath like AWS comes along as abuses OSS to make money off of someone else's work without contributing back (either with money or code) they're not operating in the spirit of open source and they're potentially making it more difficult to successfully run that company (which IS contributing software to our community). That's not cool.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#188

Post by ShakataGaNai »

Open source is great, open everything is great. But if 99.9% of companies can't make any money on open source because someone big swoops in ... then open source isn't of much use to anyone. It'll drive everyone who tries, out of business or into forced acquisition by said big player. Then people will give up on OSS for anything but hobbies and software they don't care about... and the world as a whole loses out.

So... :+1:

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#189

Post by _msw_ »

senderista wrote: post #177
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean like what AWS did with Elastic?

No. In that case, AWS built and released new Apache licensed, 100% open source extensions for Elasticache to make essential functionality like TLS encryption and authentication available to anyone. It did not fork Elasticsearch, it released a collection of software that works with the OSS core version of Elasticsearch.

Disclosure: I work at AWS on EC2, and sometimes provide my opinion on open source topics to other teams.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#190

Post by freeone3000 »

kelnos wrote: post #181
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. There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. And Amazon/Google/etc. still really wants to offer hosted…

> There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software.

There is. This is no longer an OSI license, which means it's no longer on the automatic whitelist. Using CockroachDB now requires running through legal, which really makes me reconsider just using the hosted whatever offering, despite the issues.

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