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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#241

Post by didibus »

amenod wrote: post #70
didibus wrote: post #60

I'm all for businesses coming up with whatever licensing terms they want. That said, as a user, it'll be a harder sell if I can't easily understand or validate what the license permits and doesn't. For example, with their new license, could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? Or what if I'm not offering cockroachDB as a service directly, but the s…

The way I understand it, the whole idea of this relicensing is that you can no longer take someone else's work and build your business competing with them. So no, you can't do that. Seems fair enough to me.

Right, but now there's this ambiguity about what counts as competing. And that ambiguity sounds like a risk to business, which opens a door to potential liabilities if CockroachLabs were ever to believe you are competing. That in turn makes CockroachDB a harder sell to management.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#242

Post by tolmasky »

foobiekr wrote: post #195
freeone3000 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

that's kind of a "for now" issue. eventually these will become common enough that things will shake out, but it will take years.

Hasn’t happened for GPL3, and I would bet it won’t happen for these either. More importantly, the one-click solutions offered by amazon, GCP, etc. will always be the GPL2/MIT/etc licensed products, while the others will require you to either install and manage on your own, or sign up separately outside your main cloud provider. This will be an additional point of friction (potentially more so than the licensing woes).

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#243

Post by cryptica »

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…

Now with Kubernetes, deploying to and maintaining self-hosted services to your own baremetal instances/servers is very easy but OSS solution providers need to provide the Kubernetes .yaml files.

For my OSS project, I include the k8s yaml files in the project repo along with a simple CLI script to make it even easier to deploy. Scaling a service on K8s is very easy if the service is was explicitly designed for K8s.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#244

Post by raverbashing »

gingerlime wrote: post #214
manigandham wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Redis labs doesn’t run on all regions / cloud providers sadly. I’ve asked (begged) them to support GCE in Europe for a while now... even not all AWS regions are supported as far as I’m aware.

Supporting multiple cloud providers is much less trivial than it looks like

Even multiple AWS regions is not that simple, as some other comment mentioned, not all services are in all regions (or are available but at a lower reliability level)

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#245

Post by forty »

This is really tough. I really want the redis and cockroachdbs to make money, but on the other hand I don't want to give my customer data to everyone. I give them reluctantly to AWS because, well, I guess at least one company has to have them, and while they are probably not perfect, I reasonably trust them to keep the data safe, but I'd really rather keep this to one. We could run the software on ec2 and pay a licence (we occasionally do that) but when we don't want to maintain things ourselves, we always turn to AWS, which saddens me a lot

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#246

Post by pjmlp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #228
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…

I mean what the heck are they going to do when one of these tech giants pulls a Oracle and buys the whole project out? I'd much rather see Microsoft have taken MySQL over than Oracle. It's sad that I trust Microsoft with OSS projects more than I would most tech giants, well not sad because it's Microsoft, but sad because somebody like Google used to be seen as a good tech giant that worked on OSS, but then they exten…

To realize why licenses like GPL exist, instead of pushing for non-copyleft licenses.

We are slowly getting back to the shareware and PD days, specially since many kinds of FOSS applications are hard to monetize, e.g. desktop apps.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#247

Post by pjmlp »

api wrote: post #41
JoshTriplett wrote: post #32

And one more database removes itself from the Open Source community, and disqualifies itself as a dependency of other open projects.

So the open source community is about giving free labor to Amazon? I've been an OSS user and contributor since the middle 1990s and I very much welcome these moves. SaaS has been getting a free (in the unfair sense) ride without contributing in any way.

It is when they decide to pick up non-copyleft licenses.

Should have thought about it beforehand.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#248

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

forty wrote: post #245

This is really tough. I really want the redis and cockroachdbs to make money, but on the other hand I don't want to give my customer data to everyone. I give them reluctantly to AWS because, well, I guess at least one company has to have them, and while they are probably not perfect, I reasonably trust them to keep the data safe, but I'd really rather keep this to one. We could run the software on ec2 and pay a licen…

I just had a look at https://redislabs.com/pricing/

If I understand it correctly, you can get Redis Enterprise Cloud, deployed on AWS. So, it's running on AWS, and it looks like they manage it.

That sounds to me like they are making an effort to meet your needs, of having it running on AWS (their FAQ mentions making sure that the AWS AZs are in sync), but not maintained by you.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#249

Post by paxys »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #238
paxys wrote: post #231

While I understand the move (similar to what Redis Labs, MongoDB, Confluent and many others have done recently), as one of the many contributors to these projects not affiliated with any company, it feels like a slap in the face. If such licenses gain prominence then having a healthy open source community for large-scale projects will be a thing of the past. As an outsider, it makes zero sense to be involved in the p…

I'm curious about this take. If I'm reading the article correctly it appears if you did not have plans to turn the software into a managed service this has no practical impact on you. Personally, for every open source project I've contributed to if this license has been in place rather than an open source one no one would have been impacted at a practical level (including those doing it professionally). Aside from pu…

I think it's a combination of ideological and practical (and in some sense they aren't all that different). If they changed the license once, they can do it again. As a for-profit company they are obligated to their investors and shareholders, and at some point it is inevitable that they will find ways to start charging those who want to self-host as well.

The second part of this is that a large number of open source contributions come from employees at large software companies while on company time, and they aren't going to be allowed to do so any longer if the company isn't happy with the licensing terms of the project.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#250

Post by capkutay »

alexland wrote: post #187
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 contributi…

It’s not abuse...it’s using the license exactly as is allowed.
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