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

161–170 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#161

Post by ted_dunning »

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 need a bug fix in the code as soon as possible without waiting for the vendor's priorities to match their own?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#162

Post by wave-trample-0h »

turtle_heck wrote: post #27
Icathian wrote: post #13

So the obvious question is, which big shops were using the Core version that ended up prompting this change? I know of one or two but I'm curious if there are some obvious big fish.

Weren't Oxide using CockroachDB?

Doesn't this only affect companies with more than $10M in revenue? This change should only affect companies that are a going concern and are apt to remain in business.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#163

Post by ddtaylor »

orra wrote: post #153
mplanchard wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GNU has contributor agreements?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#164

Post by karmakaze »

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.

Opensource is opensource: CockroachDB Core up until Nov 24, 2024 is, and not afterward. Anyone who wants to fork it can do so. Mind you this will be a hard fork as there's no way to keep in sync with their enterprise product.

What you say is true in that you shouldn't view a VC backed opensource offering as 'permanently' opensource by the same group.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#165

Post by jillesvangurp »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #156
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?

Unfortunately you can't do commercial licenses unless you take full ownership of each and every source contribution. So, it means there is zero guarantees the project stays open. AGPL without that is a non starter for commercial usage.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#166

Post by nsm »

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.

Yep! I actually far prefer closed source software, made by non-VC funded companies, where there business is to create good software that actually adds value for the license I'm paying for. Something like Sublime Text or JetBrains.

Sure can have people spend years of their life working on something, but release it as open source because VCs are paying for it, and that leads to more mindshare, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Similar reasons to not use VSCode (commoditizing the complement by using billions of dollars from other products).

The "must be open source (I think they actually mean free as in $$) at all costs" crowd baffles me because the money to support the humans creating the software in the real world doesn't just magically appear.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#167

Post by bityard »

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…

CockroachDB hasn't been an open source project in more than 5 years.

They took down the blog post (I'd be curious to know why), but here is the announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...

What started as a neat project with a vibrant and enthusiastic community is now just another dull beige enterprise vendor.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#168

Post by arp242 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #159
mplanchard wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most GNU projects require a copyright assignment. For example, GNU coreutils: "note that non trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF as detailed in the “Copyright Assignment” section of the Coreutils HACKING notes." (from: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils).

As far as I know, this is case for most GNU projects.

Linux only requires a confirmation that you wrote the patch; previous poster was mistaken about that, but they were correct about GNU.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#169

Post by kodablah »

candiddevmike wrote: post #59
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.

Like other folks have said, 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.

This is not necessarily true. Sometimes it's needed to pivot to a better/different open source license without going through the pain of contacting every contributor ever. I have seen that pain in some projects that want to go from LGPL to MIT or something.

For many contributors, they're ok giving full ownership of their contributions to a project owner on the owner's terms. Some contributors may not be ok with that of course, but it doesn't mean that every project owner has nefarious plans with said code ownership.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#170

Post by geenat »

karmakaze wrote: post #164
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.

Opensource is opensource: CockroachDB Core up until Nov 24, 2024 is, and not afterward. Anyone who wants to fork it can do so. Mind you this will be a hard fork as there's no way to keep in sync with their enterprise product. What you say is true in that you shouldn't view a VC backed opensource offering as 'permanently' opensource by the same group.

Kind of... Certain extensions such as basic backups are closed source and have never been in the OSS version.

Many things would have to be re-added from scratch in a fork.

Post reply on HN