Hi @jazoom,
Thanks for your comment... had a couple of clarifications. Our take on the open-source licensing of CockroachDB/MongoDB has no implication on the features of these products. So in essence, you raised two separate points (one about the licensing, the other about the dashboard/features), happy to address both.
> Question about the dashboard
The portion of the dashboard that is not related to the orchestration is going to be open-source. This is a work in progress (it needs engineering work to separate these, and we're almost there). In fact, would love to have you beta test this if you're interested - please join our community slack and holler at me.
Note that we already had the core-DB open source - now we are making previously enterprise-only features open (like encryption at rest/on wire, distributed backups and read replicas). For comparison, CockroachDB (and MongoDB) had enterprise features - which were closed (and remain so). They made changes to the core-DB as well to prevent competition, effectively making it non-open-source (if you go by the definition of open-source).
Note that we're keeping "managed service" portion called YugaByte Platform under a closed license - this is the part that "manages" the cloud experience like creating nodes automatically, configuring security groups, etc. Not sure if these other companies have an equivalent product to this.
>> However, the reality is that CockroachDB is not yet at the levels of adoption where AWS would be interested. So why did Cockroach Labs make the change?
> Because it's too late once they get to that stage. The licence needs to be changed ahead of time. Because companies generally try to plan ahead more than a few months into the future.
> I was following along with you until this point, but now I feel like you're trying to hard to paint these companies in a negative light and not give any benefit of the doubt.
We named changes done by 4 companies (Elastic, Confluent, MongoDB, CockroachDB). Two of these are positive changes (Elastic and Confluent made only enterprise features closed, while the core is still open). MongoDB and CockroachDB closed their core as well with restrictive licenses. So we're simply calling that out.
MongoDB is being offered as a service by Azure CosmosDB and AWS. The licensing change done by MongoDB did not deter Amazon. Similarly, the enterprise features in Elastic were rebuilt by AWS and open-sourced into a fork. So the lesson here is - if a cloud provider wants to, they will build it anyway. Additionally, in the case of CockroachDB and YugaByte DB - AWS has Aurora, which is over a billion dollars in yearly revenue offering the same API as Postgres, so no net new functionality here. The few extra features offered by both these products can easily be replicated by AWS given the above. AWS is in fact more likely to build on Aurora rather than taking any of these services. So in the light of this, the above point of view seems fair.
PS: Will share internally about the link not working, thanks for pointing out!