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

251–260 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#251

Post by graemep »

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…

That example is exactly why many people will not want to sign a CLA.

Someone who is has a strong preference for copyleft licences may not want to contribute to a project with a permissive license.

The intent may not be for the project owners to use the code in proprietary software, but it would be to allow someone to do so.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#252

Post by graemep »

ghshephard wrote: post #232
graemep wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can companies not use GPL3 software? I cannot see how its so different from GPL 2 for companies that are users. I can see it has some disadvantages for companies incorporating GPL software in their products, but none for companies merely using GPL 3 software.

I can't say for certain why they can't use GPLv3 - just that no company I've ever worked for (n=4 since GPLv3 came out) - will allow it on premise. It's probably why Apple stopped updating all their GNU binaries, and you have to sideload stuff with brew to use anything released in the last 10 years. If I had to guess - The patent rights clause weirds out a lot of lawyers. Obviously anyone who works with hardware does…

I can see it makes sense for Apple (anti-tivoization is something they do not want).

> I can't say for certain why they can't use GPLv3 - just that no company I've ever worked for (n=4 since GPLv3 came out) - will allow it on premise

So they do not allow the use of things like Bash or GNU coreutils? That seems quite restrictive and difficult.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#253

Post by vvern »

vdfs wrote: post #250
zachmu wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Transactional workloads over datasets in the single digit petabytes.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#254

Post by drdaeman »

riffraff wrote: post #249
drdaeman wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yea, and the point is that they really should not have picked LGPL in the first place. If you pick a copyleft license, please don't do it because it's cool - do it if and because you care for what it stands for.

However, I thought about it and I think I can get the cases where monetary opportunities started to outweigh what's essentially are political ideals. Happens all the time, heh. I guess I can imagine person not being honest with themselves until the temptation really comes. Especially if it's about casual developers trying to have some money to live comfortably (as opposed to lowering their standards of living), rather than getting rich.

I can only hope it's that and not a simple ignorance.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#255

Post by trws »

ghshephard wrote: post #232
graemep wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can companies not use GPL3 software? I cannot see how its so different from GPL 2 for companies that are users. I can see it has some disadvantages for companies incorporating GPL software in their products, but none for companies merely using GPL 3 software.

I can't say for certain why they can't use GPLv3 - just that no company I've ever worked for (n=4 since GPLv3 came out) - will allow it on premise. It's probably why Apple stopped updating all their GNU binaries, and you have to sideload stuff with brew to use anything released in the last 10 years. If I had to guess - The patent rights clause weirds out a lot of lawyers. Obviously anyone who works with hardware does…

A small refinement here, your statements are largely my experience dealing with people linking against gpl3 software because of the vitality and the patent exemptions. Most places run gpl3 stuff just fine. The one organizations won’t touch with a ten foot pole, even to run it, is AGPL.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#256

Post by zachmu »

vdfs wrote: post #250
zachmu wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Think of it as a replacement for spanner with a postgres frontend. It's about global availability and replication without application-level sharding.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#258

Post by kodablah »

graemep wrote: post #251
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…

That example is exactly why many people will not want to sign a CLA. Someone who is has a strong preference for copyleft licences may not want to contribute to a project with a permissive license. The intent may not be for the project owners to use the code in proprietary software, but it would be to allow someone to do so.

Sure, and I think the CLA is a good signal to those that care about how their contribution is used to stay away. But for everyone else that's not concerned with that, the CLA is not inherently evil.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#259

Post by shagie »

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…

I wonder... if you do something with AGPL that requires releasing the changes back ... you don't need to sign a CLA to do that.

However that would also mean that the core project couldn't accept your changes without the CLA since that would also bind them to never switching the license or relicensing your contributions for an enterprise license.

... I think. My head hurts when trying to consider the implications for CLAs and AGPL and the endless debates that lawyers could have over this.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#260

Post by CyberDildonics »

kragen wrote: post #54
cvwright wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making $10M ARR companies pay for the software that they use is not enshittification.

i mean, yes? it is? software you can't use without someone else's permission is obviously shittier than open-source software you can fork, even if you're a big company. perhaps especially if you're a big company. and software that sends telemetry to the vendor is obviously shittier than software that doesn't

i mean, no? it isn't? changing the license doesn't change the software? the software still works the same way?
Post reply on HN