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

151–160 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#151

Post by orra »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #138

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 an…

> That's another company that feels like they don't want to be an OSS company after all

TBH that's nothing new for Cockroach. Even back when they were open core, the core was so restricted it didn't include backup & restore.

I think that may have changed, but only when they changed the license of the core to BSL, that is making the core non open source for three years.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#152

Post by osigurdson »

I think the reality is, only exceeding common codebases (Linux and Postgres for example), can survive with an open source model. If the value created by the product is 1M times greater than the costs, fine, a way to support it will materialize. Otherwise, economics take over and people need to get paid. The fact that source is publicly available is largely irrelevant.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#153

Post by orra »

mplanchard wrote: post #145
jillesvangurp wrote: post #138

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 an…

tbf I think both GNU and Linux require copyright assignment, and I don't think that either of those are likely to swap licenses any time soon

FYI, you're right about GNU (by and large), but mistaken about Linux.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#154

Post by wging »

eatonphil wrote: post #56
ensignavenger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is described as a rugpull because of the marketing around it being open source. Coackroach however was never open source, it was BSL licensed. This change does appear to mean that old versions will no longer eventually convert to open source, though. Thus it would be up to the the BSL promoters and marketers to decide whether or not this is a rugpull. As an open source user and proponent, I don't really care.

> Coackroach however was never open source, it was BSL licensed. It used to be Apache2. :) Their blog post announcing this in 2019 happens to now 404: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach... But see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40058332 .

Really does appear to be memory-holed, rather than just having moved. Not a good look. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acockroachlabs.com+"Co...."

Re: CockroachDB license change

#155

Post by ted_dunning »

warvariuc wrote: post #31
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You paid $0 and contributed nothing I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".

From the standpoint of the people paying the developers of said software, it is exactly like paying $0.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#156

Post by mixmastamyk »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #138

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 an…

AGPL + commercial license is a solution for keeping a project open while avoiding the situation where profit goes to cloud hosting.

Is there a better solution?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#157

Post by ezekg »

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 said it somewhere else, but this FAQ is likely because most people think "source available on GitHub" = "open source", so they're just answering the low-hanging-fruit even if the question is technically incorrect. Not everybody is aware of the differences between "on GitHub" vs OSS, the OSI, the FSF, etc.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#158

Post by ted_dunning »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #71

I am a great fan of scaling vertically as far sa possible on DB servers. These days that is pretty damn high. It avoids a lot of prickly edge cases. It is definitively not one solution for all. There are many cases where it just won't work. I would like to see more IBM Z servers being used. $$$$$$$$ though

It doesn't solve for required multi-region data storage. Nor for data center failure resilience.

Scaling up is fine for a few things, but hopeless for many others.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#159

Post by jillesvangurp »

mplanchard wrote: post #145
jillesvangurp wrote: post #138

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 an…

tbf I think both GNU and Linux require copyright assignment, and I don't think that either of those are likely to swap licenses any time soon

Neither of those licenses require copyright ownership transfer. It's what makes Linux completely bullet proof against license changes. You'd have to track down every copyright holder (everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change) to get their permission for re-licensing their contribution. Which in the case of Linux is literally tens of thousands of individuals and companies, if not more.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#160

Post by alexvitkov »

I'm not even going to read this, we all know what it is and we all know it's just the first step in a long series of very shitty changes, expect all new development to be in the "contact us" tier.

Ignorance was maybe excusable the first 15 times, but if you keep falling for corporate owned rug-pull OSS packages in 2024, you deserve what's coming for you.

Weird databases are NFTs for startup founders. You're not too cool for Postgres. Use it.

Post reply on HN