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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#241

Post by zachmu »

alexvitkov wrote: post #160

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…

Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks.

If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money on useful software.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#242

Post by rnavi »

Amidst the frequent noise - its hard to notice that even the most stringent of OSS licenses like AGPL was written way back in 2002! Cloud was not even in the picture. Since then, ever growing cloud players have been playing the 'state' role and misusing OSS as 'religion' heavily affecting infra OSS products or companies.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#243

Post by OutOfHere »

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?

LGPL is friendlier for commercial use. Keep the core LGPL, and the enterprise version proprietary.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#244

Post by largbae »

riku_iki wrote: post #190
spiffytech wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but unlike BSL you can fork the last Apache commit the day they do.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#245

Post by nailer »

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…

Slightly off-topic but:

> a future Oracle/landlord

I don't think I've ever heard Oracle's business model described so accurately.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#246

Post by stickfigure »

alexvitkov wrote: post #160

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…

Maybe not cool, but you can, in fact, be both too big and too geographically distributed for Postgres.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#247

Post by LaserToy »

skunkworker wrote: post #120
geenat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last time I priced out CockroachDB it was more than 10x what multi region SpannerDB would cost.

That is very interesting. As CRDB user, I priced Spanner (had to do some estimates during load testing), and Spanner came 3 times more expensive includign our eng salary to run CRDB

Re: CockroachDB license change

#249

Post by riffraff »

drdaeman wrote: post #184
kodablah wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

(L)GPL to MIT is a choice many projects made when they decided they cared more about their code being used than about it staying free.

Copyleft licenses were the default choice at some point in time, but then in the '10s most big projects seemed to pick a permissive license, and many switched.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#250

Post by vdfs »

zachmu wrote: post #241
alexvitkov wrote: post #160

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…

Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks. If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money…

Without marketing bs, what's something that can be done only with Cockroach and not postgres or other truly-OSS alternatives? I'm curios because I've been reading news about it forever but never had the chance to work with it
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