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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#111

Post by evantbyrne »

ensignavenger wrote: post #61
dzonga wrote: post #42

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

Whats your appetite for a SaaS vendor unpredictably and without enough warning changing the price they are charging you, or pushing updates to the SaaS that break your business? Better get it put into the contract.

Their target customers for self-hosting are Enterprises with a capital E who are used to signing multi-year software contracts.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#112

Post by traderj0e »

Cwizard wrote: post #16
tschellenbach wrote: post #9

We will probably end up removing CockroachDB from our infra due to this change. It also makes me a bit worried about their long term viability. How much ARR does CockroachDB have and what was their last round valuation...?

What will you switch to? I feel like there isn’t a good alternative.

Application-level sharding?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#113

Post by jappgar »

"Open-source" in 2024 is a synonym for "ransomware."

It's still nice that I can audit the code and contribute (unpaid) changes, but I no longer assume anyone is acting in good faith.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#114

Post by ensignavenger »

evantbyrne wrote: post #111
ensignavenger wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats your appetite for a SaaS vendor unpredictably and without enough warning changing the price they are charging you, or pushing updates to the SaaS that break your business? Better get it put into the contract.

Their target customers for self-hosting are Enterprises with a capital E who are used to signing multi-year software contracts.

I don't know much about CockroachDB's business, so I was just speaking in general about SaaS products and licensing non-open source software.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#115

Post by cortesoft »

saurik wrote: post #98
_benedict wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ASF requires a CLA for all regular contributors or large contributions, so I don’t think this is a particularly good barometer.

The difference with the ASF/FSF is that they are non-profits with a mission statement (and, if we don't trust that enough--due to OpenAI, as I don't entirely understand what happened there--with clearly-mission-aligned board leadership) that prevent them from pulling the rug out from under their license. (...and, right as I pushed this comment, I see that someone else looked into it, and maybe the ASF fails to have s…

Sure, but that contradicts the statement made in the comment they are replying to:

> anytime you see a CLA, you see the true intentions of the project. A project that will always be FOSS won't have a need for a CLA.

If there are conditions to the statement, it isn't "anytime you see a CLA".

Re: CockroachDB license change

#116

Post by samlambert »

vvern wrote: post #92
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.

Last time I checked, the cockroach serverless pricing model and free tier were cheaper than planet scale for small projects. IIRC, the dedicated cloud product was also cheaper if you kept it utilized. What’s your evidence that planetscale is cheaper? For example, planetscale charges 3x as much per gb of storage if I read the pricing correctly.

we charge per node and you get 3 nodes by default so it’s not 3x it’s just that you have more nodes.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#117

Post by zellyn »

notpushkin wrote: post #86
mardifoufs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's useful to use a Postgres-compatible syntax. The point of Cockroach was always to compete with globe-spanning DBs like Spanner, not with (possibly) sharded PG.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#118

Post by nickpsecurity »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #109
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…

> They may be nice folks today, but who knows who will run the place in 5y when the next round of squeeze comes? The same idea applies to political questions. A politician I like is proposing a policy I approve of. Great! Now what happens in the next election cycle, when a politician I don't like gets to use that same power to do something I don't approve of? Woops.

We can vote for different politicians after a few years. The politicians can vote to remove laws that were problems. There’s a straight-forward solution to that.

Building critical features on a single, closed-standard database means you can’t leave unless you rewrite all code that relied on it. The new code must integrate in the system well. The change must also happen without taking down the business.

For these reasons, politicians and laws change regularly but companies rarely escape database lockin.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#119

Post by traderj0e »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #78

I've never seen this database used by anyone in real life.

I'm skeptical of this kind of multi-master horizontal DBMS to begin with. Never used Cockroach but have used Spanner, and even besides the $, you pay with complexity, slowness, and limitations. Even the in-betweens like Citus have their issues. As far as I can tell, the world runs on traditional DBMSes like Postgres, maybe with HA. If you're big, you run multiple and shard at the application level. I don't think there's a better option yet.

Btw, Spanner and Cockroach both have fully serializable transactions. Even single-node Postgres doesn't do that by default (though it can) because they didn't think the performance tradeoff was worthwhile. Read-committed is good enough.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#120

Post by skunkworker »

geenat wrote: post #23
sho wrote: post #10

Probably a good move. I'd looked at Cockroach before for a project - they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless, while Enterprise was some absolutely insane figure for a cash-strapped startup. While it was possible to hotfix the code to get around their restrictions - we eventually just used something else. This at least gets the full-fledged product in t…

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.

The last time I priced out CockroachDB it was more than 10x what multi region SpannerDB would cost.
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