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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#171

Post by rpdillon »

ddtaylor wrote: post #163
orra wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GNU has contributor agreements?

Absolutely! They want to have standing in court so they can defend infringers, and that's materially easier to establish with copyright assignment agreements.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

So while I agree with other commenters that a CLA is a clear indication that the entity seeking to have copyright assigned wants to reserve the right to take some kind of legal action at some point (like changing the license), it also applies in cases where the legal action is benevolent rather than malevolent (like defending the copyright).

Re: CockroachDB license change

#172

Post by vvern »

samlambert wrote: post #116
vvern wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cockroach is also doing 3x replication of the data, so I don’t think that’s particularly relevant here. Cockroach serverless will dynamically scale up sql serving processes based on load. The storage and compute are separated in the cockroach architecture. My point is that if your query load is relatively low, cockroach serverless is definitely cheaper because the storage costs dominate. I think there’s ambiguity on which product is cheaper for a real-world application with meaningful load and data size.

I remain curious about the perception that cockroach is a meaningfully more expensive product. Where does that idea come from?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#173

Post by riku_iki »

Thaxll wrote: post #46
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…

Most of those solutions are not on part with Cockroach, Cockroach is basically Spanner usable outside of Google. So global transaction with cluster world wide.

There are some contenders in that list: TiDB, YugabyteDB, YDB.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#175

Post by mehulashah »

It seems a shame that to grow, companies are backing away from the vector that got them there: open source.

I agree that current cloud providers are gaining more benefit from open source than they're putting in. So, it seems logical that the main developers want to recapture some of that.

On the other hand, open source is supposed to help build a bigger pie. If the pie gets bigger faster (i.e. more people using CockroachDB) then is the recapture worth it?

It seems the smaller companies think so. But, I don't know of a solid analysis that shows this to be true.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#176

Post by ghshephard »

haolez wrote: post #131
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.

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.

GPL is actually a great license for this scenario. The software advances to a particular level of development, inertia, market penetration - then the company that owns the software dual licenses with GPLv3 - which no company can risk to have on their premise, distribute, or use/touch, etc... - ergo you then have to pay for a commercial license to avoid the GPLv3 taint.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#177

Post by mdasen »

hansihe wrote: post #70
sidewndr46 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's still open source and actively maintained by Apple, they use it internally. https://github.com/apple/foundationdb

It is now. There were a few years where it had basically disappeared (2015-2018). When Apple eventually put it back in the open-source world, it was done with little fanfare so it could be easy to miss.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#178

Post by geenat »

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.

Re: CockroachDB vs Planetscale. It's all about the price per core of the CockroachDB license.

In my understanding, last time I talked to sales it's approximately 3x worse (because Planetscale offers 1 primary + 2 replicas) with CockroachDB you'd have to triple the CockroachDB license fees to even be competitive to achieve the same HA .... on hardware you purchase and run yourself.

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