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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

211–220 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#211
post #192

Anyone here migrated to TiDB from cockroach and can share experience? Asking for a friend…

It's a lot more moving parts unfortunately and the TiDB team has historically little interest in fixing that.

TiDB CTO here, I think that a clear boundary between components is beneficial for the maintainability of a distributed systems like TiDB, and automated deployment tools like `tiup`(https://tiup.io) and the Operator of Kubernetes shield end-users from this complexity in order to maintain best practices in deployment. While still providing enough debugging details for advanced users.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#213
post #131

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.

Maybe? Every day it seems clearer that Stallman is right. Mouse subscription? Windows displaying ads in start menu and recording everything you do? How many devices have become useless when the servers shot down, or games became unplayable? How many times books or songs or movies have disappeared from "online collections" after being paid for? "The right to read" seems more and more realistic as time passes.

In my opinion, Stallman has been proven right many times over.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#214

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.

What happens the day where the only way to fork it realistically is to pay people. And I mean good people to even keep up? And what if on top of that the bests in the game are already in the corporations that you want to fork from?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#215
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 FS…

> Old school open source projects don't seem particularly profitable.

And is also subject to survivorship bias. For every OSS project that makes it, tens of thousands do not.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#216

"Open-source" in 2024 is a synonym for "ransomware." It's still nice that I can audit the code and contribute (unpaid) changes, but I no longer assume anyone is acting in good faith.

This is why you should look for software that calls itself "FOSS" or "Free Software" instead. Avoid CLAs at all costs as well. If the software is licensed under a GPL-like license without a CLA and has had significant contributions from multiple people, this relicensing rugpull is nearly impossible.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#217

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 c…

This actually moves stuff out of the "contact us" tier, where it used to be, and makes everything available to all. There are new hooks, but paywalling capabilities was not the point here.

New hooks like disabling my database if the telemetry API call fails?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#218

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.

No, the FSF specifically requires ownership transfer for GNU projects, so that they can do things like go after infringements in court, or relicense GNU projects to newer versions of the GPL unconditionally, e.g. when GPLv3 was released.

Ironically, CLAs like the one Google and Meta use for their projects on GitHub do not require ownership transfer -- only the rights to redistribute, because the prevailing Lawyer-brain belief is (roughly, to my understanding) that just assuming that right from the license itself isn't necessarily sound.

For licenses like Apache 2.0, assignment/ownership is a kind of irrelevant practical distinction because entities can just distribute proprietary versions anyway (and because it's not clear if you really agree to much more than e.g. Apache 2.0 implies), which is the prevailing worry people have. Most of the people here actually want GPL-style copyleft licenses along with some vague idea of a "communal project", even if they don't know it. Because that's the only way to achieve the practical desired outcome, where your code and contributions stay open and are difficult to "rework" in this way. The talk about CLAs and all the other stuff is irrelevant; it's a matter of the politics and composition of the project, not the exact legal words in the license.

> everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change

That depends on the jurisdiction. There is a concept called the "threshold of originality" in the US which states roughly that some obvious, trivial things just can't be copyrighted. Typofix patches that change "form" to "from" aren't meaningful enough to be given copyright, so you literally do not need to be consulted on the matter at all. It is not clear that simple bugfixes fit under this definition either for example, because they may be obvious. Realistically, I'd say there are very few contributions that are going to fit in 1 line while being original enough for copyright to apply. They could also just not include your patch too or rewrite it, in that case, so the "1 line" case is pretty much meaningless in practice.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#220

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.

I actually think source available software is great. Not every piece of software can survive as OSS but source available eliminates most the downsides of closed-source software from a technical perspective.

In my daily life I use a lot of essentially source-available software that I pay for. I spend like 4+ hours a day every day in IntelliJ IDEA etc. I don't have a problem paying for software, I have huge problems paying for software that I don't sufficiently control and/or it's closed-source nature affects it's ability to get it's job done - i.e anything mission critical where uptime and security are paramount.

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