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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#281

Post by ThinkBeat »

I always hate these discussions.

If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it.

But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that?

You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee.

Here we have people building things on a foundatino of free and open source software, and they feel that they should get paid for the slice that they built, but are they themselves paying every party that was resposible for creating the stack on which they are working? I think usually not.

Everyone is quite happy to accept the free work done by others but they miraculously expect to be the person getting paid.

Now RedHat took GNU/Linux and figured they ought to get paid for creating a packages, a bit of an eco system around their version and sell support and such. Was that fair?

AWS offering some service, are basically doing hosting and support on the product. A lot of people trust AWS/Google/Microsoft to run things in the cloud for them.

Nothing is stopping me from creating ThinkBeat Linux and charge for support. Probably I would do very poorly because people now trust RedHat or Linode, AWS to handle issues around Linux for them.

I dont think if you create a new database managment system that ou think is great, users will flock from Azure/AWS/GCP/Oracle/IBM to pay you for hosting it for them. You are too small and too risky. Obiouvlsy some people will sign up and if you can earn money you need on that then good.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#282

Post by dragonwriter »

hartator wrote: post #27
ComputerGuru wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "API" you are referring to is known as SQL, transmitted over the wire using the pgsql protocol. There's nothing to copy. The magic of Cockroach is in the implementation.

Not sure why they changed their license then. Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB?

> Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB?

They have actual managed Postgres with RDS for Postgres, and also a Postgres-compatible (SQL dialect and wire protocol) version of RDS Aurora.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#283

Post by mindcrime »

kelnos wrote: post #279
mindcrime wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lic…

> 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. In general, that's of course obviously true. For software like this, that's geared toward use by businesses and SaaS applications, I agree with Cockroach Labs. Their hosted solution doesn't stand a chance if AWS decides to do a hosted ve…

In general, that's of course obviously true. For software like this, that's geared toward use by businesses and SaaS applications, I agree with Cockroach Labs. Their hosted solution doesn't stand a chance if AWS decides to do a hosted version of CockroachDB, and they won't see a penny of that revenue.

I understand why this is the default assumption that people tend to make, but I'm not sure this analysis goes deep enough. I believe things are more nuanced than "you can't compete with Amazon". There are always a lot of different axes on which you can segment a market, and different attributes on which one can compete. And ironically, the fact that AWS (and other public cloud providers) exist simultaneously makes it easier to run your own cloud based service. And yes, it's possible to have something hosted on AWS while Amazon compete with you at the same time - see Netflix for the obvious example.

Note that I'm not saying it's easy to do any of this, and maybe a thorough enough analysis would reveal that, for CockroachDB it really is the case that "we can't compete in a market where AWS is playing". But I wouldn't necessarily take that as a given without having done a lot more research.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#284

Post by amenod »

didibus wrote: post #239
amenod wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still not free/open/libre source anymore, because you are discriminating against someone, so it's not in-line with the set of freedoms as defined by both OSI and FSF. Whether this matters to you or not is another question, of course... :)

Hum, I feel there's some ambiguity there. Like FSF says from here https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html : > A free program must offer the four freedoms to any user that obtains a copy of the software, provided the user has complied thus far with the conditions of the free license covering the software. It's unclear what "obtains a copy" means. You could make it that certain companies are not allowed to "obta…

Sure - except that under their definition of freedoms you are allowed to share software with anyone, so while you can sell it to the first person, they can freely share it with anyone.

But truly, I don't think looking for holes in definition of freedom would help anyone. The question if, do these definitions achieve what we have set out to do, and in what way? If yes, great. If not, maybe the time has come to define another set of freedoms, which still protect users better than closed source, but allow developers and maintainers to make money from their creations. And yes, they will not be open source, so we might as well come up with a different term.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#285

Post by amenod »

didibus wrote: post #241
amenod wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. Though in this case it's very admirable how cleanly they have specified the exception case. But yes, it is a harder sell, and this is the main issue that these licenses must solve if they want to be successful.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#286

Post by paxys »

brianpgordon wrote: post #275
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…

Wait, Cockroach Labs accepts external code contributions? How are they able to pull the rug out from under you and relicense the code without your consent? Did you sign a CLA giving away your rights?

They all do. Here's the Cockroach Labs CLA: https://cla-assistant.io/cockroachdb/cockroach

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#287

Post by jeena »

dragonwriter wrote: post #270
jeena wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is essentially no difference between Open Source and Free Software, though people who prefer one label over the other tend to have different ideologies. In practice essentially everything that is recognized as Free Software by the FSF and the broader Free Software community is likewise recognized as Open Source by OSI and the broader Open Source community, and vice versa.

The difference is the focus, the one is focused on developers (and businesses) the other one on users. Which to me makes a huge difference to where the licenses used evolve, like we see in this article.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#288

Post by nickpsecurity »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #281

I always hate these discussions. If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee. Here we have people building things on a foundatino o…

"If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee."

The problem with these discussions is they always set up this false comparison. Then, what's going on looks hypocritical. Here's what actually happened:

1. Linus et al released Linux with a license that says, "Pay us nothing. Just give back any changes in code you distribute." That's their goal. Those with permissive licenses said "Use it and don't share anything unless you want to." That's their goal per the license agreement.

2. Cockroach Labs started with a goal of making a huge pile of profit on a database whose core they keep as free and OSS as possible. The profit takes priority due to VC funding. That's their goals.

Cockroach making profit on Linus et al's work without paying them isn't hypocritical since their license's actual goal was to do that. Whereas, the SaaS vendors are posing a challenge for Cockroach achieving their goals which require making money off their activities. Balancing giving code out as OSS and profit-seeking, they lightly-modified a license that starts as proprietary but goes Apache after 3 years. Personally, I think they're being way, way, too altruistic given what rate of return they're expected to come up with.

If anything, people that wrote their dependencies using freeloader-loving licenses are either achieving their goal of commercial uptake or need to pick a license that incentivizes their goals (or just blocks things they hate). If contributors, probably should contribute to software with strongest copyleft available. AGPL and Parity come to mind. Folks using licenses that don't require payment shouldn't expect payment. If folks want payment, then they should sell the software somehow with licenses worded to bring in revenue.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#289

Post by senderista »

solidasparagus wrote: post #224
senderista wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would be shocked if any service in AWS was running on bare metal.

You would be surprised...

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#290

Post by [deleted] »

solidasparagus wrote: post #224
senderista wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would be shocked if any service in AWS was running on bare metal.

[deleted]
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