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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#131

Post by haolez »

andrewmutz wrote: post #53
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…

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.

Old(?) school open source with GPL licenses doesn't seem to suffer from this, on a first glance. Maybe Stallman was right. Would love to hear from someone more knowledgeable on this. I'm not trying to troll.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#132

Post by saurik »

cortesoft wrote: post #115
saurik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Sure, but now we would need to find another epicycle for why giving a for-profit corporation this dangerous power over its licensees is safe/benign. There is, at times, some logic to "the exception that proves the rule".

Re: CockroachDB license change

#134

Post by scblock »

ezekg wrote: post #105
scblock wrote: post #17

Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". "CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license" sounds correct but it's still sidestepping the question. And "the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions" is completely shit. Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. Also, th…

> Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". CockroachDB hasn't been open source for over 5 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...

Yet it's one of the top questions on their announcement page and they won't clearly answer it.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#135

Post by bonzini »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #68

Finally all Open Source pretense is dropped. CockroachDB becomes Enterprise+Cloud database company with a free tier, not dissimilar from Oracle. The revenue driver as a driver for freemium tier is interesting as it seems like it would require company to regularly disclose their revenue to CockroachDB which looks intrusive.

Props for calling it source available and not hiding behind "you can't police the meaning of open source", though.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#136

Post by [deleted] »

dastbe wrote: post #76
scblock wrote: post #17

Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". "CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license" sounds correct but it's still sidestepping the question. And "the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions" is completely shit. Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. Also, th…

> Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. Because they'd be getting paid to do it for their company? I know of a few customers who, if they could, would have their employees contribute minor features to AWS services to solve issues.

[deleted]

Re: CockroachDB license change

#137

Post by JonChesterfield »

Thoreandan wrote: post #129

> Does this mean that CockroachDB is no longer open source? > CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license. While the new license is a proprietary enterprise license, the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions. The word you're looking for is "yes".

I'm just so shocked that VC is following the open source for a while then fuck you business playbook. If only there was prior art to warn people that this was a risk, like all the other VC backed software projects.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#138

Post by jillesvangurp »

That's another company that feels like they don't want to be an OSS company after all. After Elastic, I pay more attention to contributor agreements. Basically I consider any project that requires transfer of copyright for OSS contributions as likely to change their license at some point. It's fine; I'm not against that sort of thing and I sometimes pay for software. But I like to know what I'm getting into before and I don't appreciate the bait and switch. It also guides decisions as to what I contribute to actively.

I do a simple sanity check with any OSS software before using it:

- Make sure there is no contributor agreement requirements. This is a gigantic red flag that the license can and probably will be changed at some point.

- Make sure the license is not overly restrictive (like AGPL). I appreciate people have good reasons for picking this license; but it comes with some serious restrictions in a commercial environment. And like it or not, a lot of companies have active policies against this. Either way, I avoid anything with this license.

- Make sure the project is actively maintained. You don't want to get stuck with unmaintained software. Replacing dependencies is a PITA.

- Make sure the project is not overly dependent on VC funding. Startups fail all the time at which point anything they worked on turns into abandon ware.

- Ideally, make sure the project has a healthy diverse group of committers. Healthy here means more than one company is involved. Most projects that fail one or more of the above tests usually aren't very healthy in this sense.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#139

Post by 999900000999 »

zellyn wrote: post #128
999900000999 wrote: post #44

I'm trying to figure out how this is better than Postgress ? Does it perform significantly better to justify the cost? Back in the day I worked heavily with databases and we always tilted towards open source.

For most databases (like Postgres), you typically run a single database (per shard, possibly), and replicate changes to a live read-only backup as fast as possible. If the live R/W database fails, you quickly switch the backup to R/W, and point traffic there instead. Then, there's a class of databases that tries to actively commit across multiple geographies. You pay a cost (in terms of latency, and typically also $$…

Assuming I need to host on prem, do any fully open source solutions exist for this .

It really looks like every database company is trying to become Oracle. You want your clients to be trapped and unable to leave, so if you hypothetically just up the price by 30 or 40% upon renewal they either have to rewrite their entire stack, or pay the piper.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#140

Post by tristan957 »

ko_pivot wrote: post #6
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…

I don’t believe Neon supports multiple write nodes.

It currently does not, but it's something we would like to eventually support.

- employee

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