Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#41

Post by [deleted] »

api wrote: post #22
ko_pivot wrote: post #14

As much as this has the vibes of a classic OSS rug pull, as a Cockroach user, I don’t really take it that way. First of all, it was already not open source and secondly, the free to use version was missing key features like follower reads and incremental backups.

Someone creating free software and changing the license on software they created isn't a "rug pull" in any sense of the word. You paid $0 and contributed nothing. What rug is being pulled? A rug pull is when you buy into something and then it's taken away, like when a cryptocurrency token is busted out or you spend money on something and then it's cancelled or nerfed. Don't like it? Write your own distributed fault t…

[deleted]

Re: CockroachDB license change

#42

Post by dzonga »

predictable and pretty good business move.

these things are easy to evaluate - 1. what's your appetite in running infra ? low - then use the SAAS offering 2. doable - then use a db that has good scalable solutions in this case mysql -> vitess since those products don't come from a database vendor. mongo might qualify too

Re: CockroachDB license change

#43

Post by jauntywundrkind »

You need an enterprise that's already decided to use CockroachDB if your trial offer is only 30 days long. We've barely walked around the car & kicked the tires before that trial runs out; it's not respectful of the time it takes enterprises to move at all.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#45

Post by mrweasel »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #5

at least should still cover a lot of businesses under the free tier > Individuals and businesses, under $10M in annual revenue, can use CockroachDB Enterprise for free

You just can't build anything new based on CockroachDB now, because the pricing for self-hosted is "Contact us". So if you build a product you'd need to contact them first and kinda guess how successful you'll be. Maybe it's fine and the license cost isn't a big deal, or it will completely ruin your business case.

Plenty of us have had to deal with this scenarios before with Oracle. Cheap or free to get started, then your product takes off and Oracle shows up and starts to demand their cut. I'm not suggesting that Cockroach is the new Oracle, but this type of licensing introduces a significant uncertainty into your future plans.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#46

Post by Thaxll »

geenat wrote: post #3

Overall I feel like this is a step in the right direction. I do love Cockroach, but the old licensing model was pretty brutal if you required any enterprise features (ex: incremental backup). For reference, some other data stores doing "horizontal scale of writes" ..any others I'm missing ? * MySQL: Vitess, Planetscale, TiDB, MariaDB Spider * Postgres: Citus, YugabyteDB, YDB, Neon * SQLite: mvsqlite, marmot * Documen…

Most of those solutions are not on part with Cockroach, Cockroach is basically Spanner usable outside of Google. So global transaction with cluster world wide.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#47

Post by candiddevmike »

tvink wrote: post #4

Free license: > Telemetry Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less) So not free, then. Is there already a popular fork?

CockroachDB was already under the BSL. It's interesting that they're further restricting it... Perhaps the BSL isn't the panacea folks are making it out to be.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#48

Post by kragen »

cvwright wrote: post #25
kragen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it hasn't been open-source since 02019 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History so if there are popular forks they'd have to be five years old

BSL code automatically converts to open source at a specified date. So probably several releases since then are now as open source as anything else in the world. And if not, then they will be soon - BSL allows a maximum 5 year delay.

that may be (i haven't read the license) but i'm not persuaded it's relevant

if nobody forked it five years ago, they probably aren't going to fork it now

if somebody did fork it five years ago, they probably aren't going to try to merge in new source code drops as they convert to open source

Re: CockroachDB license change

#49

Post by ROFISH »

AYBABTME wrote: post #28

I understand the goal, and the perceived abuse of the Core edition. But the problem with the Enterprise edition is that it's quite expensive, "contact us" salesy, and it feels like taking a bite of this edition is possibly getting into bed with a future Oracle/landlord type of relationship where you end up squeezed by your database vendor. The Core offering made this palatable, one could fallback to Core features if…

Agreed. I talked with them in the past and the pricing was far too expensive to make it worth it.

As always: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

Re: CockroachDB license change

#50

Post by candiddevmike »

AYBABTME wrote: post #28

I understand the goal, and the perceived abuse of the Core edition. But the problem with the Enterprise edition is that it's quite expensive, "contact us" salesy, and it feels like taking a bite of this edition is possibly getting into bed with a future Oracle/landlord type of relationship where you end up squeezed by your database vendor. The Core offering made this palatable, one could fallback to Core features if…

There is no abuse here. They released software under a specific license (BSL at that, plenty of opportunities to restrict).
Post reply on HN