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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#181

Post by karmakaze »

geenat wrote: post #170
karmakaze wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm having trouble parsing/making sense of this. Was basic backup in Core? If you were running anything more than Core you weren't running an OSS version and had already crossed that line before this announcement. If you were running an OSS version there's nothing to add, just fork, no?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#183

Post by omoikane »

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.

Old school open source projects don't seem particularly profitable. The projects themselves might thrive, but that seem to rely on altruistic developers with other sources of income.

Richard Stallman himself doesn't seem to make money from any software he made directly, but from various grants and such, for example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220123032418/http://tech.mit.e...

I thought he was on the payroll for FSF, but his reportable compensation has been zero from 2002 to 2022 according to:

https://www.fsf.org/about/financial

Re: CockroachDB license change

#184

Post by drdaeman »

kodablah wrote: post #169
candiddevmike wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> better/different open source license

And that's why "open source" is a really bad term that no one should use unironically, unless they want to confuse the hell out of people.

There are protective (copyleft) licenses, and there are permissive licenses - and they're very different beasts. And it's, like, software licensing 101.

> that want to go from LGPL to MIT or something

I find this extremely weird.

In a sane world, picking a copyleft license must mean that you care about user freedoms and want to make sure they're respected no matter what happens. Because that's the whole point of picking a copyleft license - not about letting people peek or tweak some code, not about social brownie points, and most certainly not about marketing campaigns - but about granting users their freedoms.

Either people get confused about "open source" and pick... I don't know, whatever looks cool, without even understanding what they're doing; or they're giving up on their principles when they smell the money.

I can understand wanting to go from, say, GPL to AGPL, or GPLv2 to GPLv3[+] - it would make sense, as it all goes in line of protecting freedoms. But LGPL to MIT is truly a weird one.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#189

Post by jaaron »

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.

> 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.

I know it's not as popular or sexy as it used to be, but the whole point of a foundation like Apache was to avoid these situations, even more than the way the Linux Foundation is setup. Apache _explicitly_ manages projects to avoid these downsides.

- Single corporation ownership. Projects cannot get out of the Incubator unless they demonstrate a diverse and healthy community. That doesn't mean popular, it doesn't necessarily mean best-in-class, but it means that there shouldn't be just one entity backing a project.

- Membership in Apache is _personal_ not a seat for a given company. If you're a committer on an Apache project and you move jobs, you're _still_ a committer on that project

- The Foundation owns the trademarks. There have been fights about this in the past, but the whole idea is that the _community_ owns the name, so some corporation can't claim to be the sole or official owner by naming their company or product after the open source product.

The core premise of the Apache Software Foundation is community over code, that healthy, diverse communities have a better chance of standing the test of time than open source projects backed by a single individual or company. That's the thesis at least.

The is starkly different from several other foundations, notably the Linux Foundation or Eclipse Foundation which are modeled more around industry consortiums.

Both models have their place, but I believe Apache better models the core values many of us feel strongly about when it comes to free and open source software.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#190

Post by riku_iki »

spiffytech wrote: post #91
jen20 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, Yugabyte (the company) has taken 290 million dollars of VC money. It's probably a safe assumption that they will follow the same path soon enough.

While the future is unwritten, FWIW in 2019 Yugabyte moved to Apache 2.0, open-sourcing features that were previously paywalled. They wrote up their rationale here: https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/why-we-changed-yugabyte-db-lic...

This won't prevent them back to paywall in future if investors ask.
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