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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#81

Post by ezekg »

I posted it on Twitter, but I feel like revenue-based licensing models unnecessarily push the compliance burden onto the user. It's an honor system, and even they admit it [0]; even Unity, who also uses a revenue-based model, admits it [1]. I'd prefer licensing models that are able to automatically segment users into customers at the software-level, such as a feature-based or usage-based model. For example, they could segment on CPU count or disk size, requiring an Enterprise offering for databases or clusters over a certain threshold.

But completely doing away with Core and requiring license keys even for free users [2] (which I assume is for revenue auditing purposes) ... I feel like that's a big step backwards. All of this because their Enterprise offering seemingly wasn't valuable enough (or from the comments -- it was too expensive).

I'd of focused there, on making Enterprise more valuable or more accessible, instead of doing something this drastic.

AFAICT, they're also doing away with BUSL and DOSP [3], which is a big bummer.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/cockroach-labs-shakes-up-i...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_u...

[2]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announ...

[3]: https://opensource.org/dosp

Re: CockroachDB license change

#82

Post by geenat »

aduffy wrote: post #32
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?

Yes, the popular fork is called Postgres. You can find many vendors who will let you run it on one node cheaply. It’s also free to self-host.

Citus gets close for many usecases but the HA story sucks: https://github.com/citusdata/citus/issues/7602

Re: CockroachDB license change

#84

Post by ezekg »

madduci wrote: post #21
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…

The only thing I don't like is the mandatory telemetry.

I don't like the fact that even free users need an annual license key.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#85

Post by brianwawok »

yawboakye wrote: post #64
andrewmutz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that whenever an open source project is run by a VC-backed company, it sooner or later ends up like this. Increasingly it seems that "open source" is just the teaser to get people interested and then when investors want revenue growth, the rug gets pulled. IMO, it's not really open source if its run by a company that will eventually use its position to squeeze its users for cash.

start open/source available has become a trend among yc-backed startups lately. one wonders how long before a “well, actually, we need a business-y license.”

Lately? This was cool like 12 years ago. Then you turn commercial once you get enough users. It’s the open source chameleon model.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#86

Post by notpushkin »

mardifoufs wrote: post #75
aduffy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the popular fork is called Postgres. You can find many vendors who will let you run it on one node cheaply. It’s also free to self-host.

In what way is postgres similar to cockroachdb? Except for being a database. Going by that standard you might as well say that Access is an alternative to postgres. Which it technically is but...

Cockroach marketed themselves as largely Postgres-compatible, so I guess there's that.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#87

Post by dtf »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #63
jwr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you mean by "horizontal scale of writes" is a distributed database, then there is FoundationDB, which is one of the very few databases that offers strict serializability (see https://jepsen.io/consistency ). But it isn't quite comparable, because it isn't an easy-to-use shiny tool, rather a database-building toolkit (hence the name).

What? FoundationDB disappeared down the memory hole whenever Apple acquired them.

Deno KV uses FoundationDB, for example:

https://deno.com/blog/building-deno-kv

Re: CockroachDB license change

#88

Post by brianwawok »

dathinab wrote: post #65
geenat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enterprise per core is still an insane figure, based on last time I interacted with sales- would be amazing if this was revised, too, to be more competitive with Planetscale, etc. Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.

through cash strapped startups can now use the "free" enterprise version until they reach 10M$ annual revenue weather it's a good idea to commit to it if you might not want to afford it once your revenue went up is another matter and 10M$ annually is not little but also no absurdly huge, I mean a ~80 person company probably will struggle to be profitable with that revenue (if it's 80 good paying jobs like software de…

For a US startup I would divide annual revenue by aprox 200k for reasonable bootstrapped employee max size. So maybe 50 max? This is assuming standard software startup with most cost being employees.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#89

Post by ezekg »

michaelt wrote: post #80
red_admiral wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but according to the licence agreement, there are "technical countermeasures" to stop you from using the product if you were to block telemetry with a firewall (presumably it stops working if the telemetry server doesn't send back an acknowledgement), and "You understand and agree that Licensor may use and disclose personal information collected as part of Telemetry in accordance with Licensor's Privac…

In the closed source world it's common enough that free trials will be something along the lines of "we give you a license key tied to your name, and every time you start the software it calls into our license server to validate the license key" It's bad, but it's not unusual if you use closed-source software.

Sure, but I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use a signed license file with a start- and stop-date in this case. Lots of companies, especially enterprises, run air-gaps and telemetry just won't work there. And they should know that... it's their target market after all...

Re: CockroachDB license change

#90

Post by red_admiral »

michaelt wrote: post #80
red_admiral wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but according to the licence agreement, there are "technical countermeasures" to stop you from using the product if you were to block telemetry with a firewall (presumably it stops working if the telemetry server doesn't send back an acknowledgement), and "You understand and agree that Licensor may use and disclose personal information collected as part of Telemetry in accordance with Licensor's Privac…

In the closed source world it's common enough that free trials will be something along the lines of "we give you a license key tied to your name, and every time you start the software it calls into our license server to validate the license key" It's bad, but it's not unusual if you use closed-source software.

I guess this is fine for a free _trial_, if you can host it in some separate firewalled-off subnet where it doesn't touch your real customer data.

The issue here is that if you're an org with less than $10M turnover, you're currently on the Core plan and don't want to negotiate the full "Enterprise" licence (which is presumably priced towards larger users than you anyway), then you can't use the thing at all anymore unless you agree to telemetry and some vague disclosure of personal data thing that will get your lawyers in a spin (especially if you serve states in which GDPR applies).

EDIT: oh, and PCI-DSS requirements if you want to take credit cards? That's going to be fun.

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