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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#261

Post by kodablah »

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…

> picking a copyleft license must mean that you care about user freedoms [...] they're giving up on their principles

This is a personal bias and disregards others' definition of true do-whatever-you-want freedom. Different project owners may think differently on what free means and alter the license to respect their principles (and may consider copyleft to be the restrictive/anti-free mistake made early on based on these same kinds of personal biases).

And many contributors don't really care what the project owner does with their code and the CLA lets them delegate responsibility.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#262

Post by shagie »

znpy wrote: post #223
arp242 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most GNU projects require a copyright assignment. For example, GNU coreutils: "note that non trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF as detailed in the “Copyright Assignment” section of the Coreutils HACKING notes." (from: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils ). As far as I know, this is case for most GNU projects. Linux only requires a confirmation that you wrote the patch; previous poste…

This is a trust point, though: assigning copyright to the free software foundation allows code to be relicensed under new versions of the gpl.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html - section 14

    The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.

    Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
Note the "or any later version" verbiage in there. If the software is licensed under "GPLv3 or any later version" - no permission is required or assignment of copyright.

And so when you see things like https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Coreutils

Note also the "if you used the GPL without a version number, you can relicense it under any version"

---

The "why they require a CLA" is for enforcement.

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

    In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#263

Post by pas »

nailer wrote: post #245
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.

it's the classic vendor lock-in, it's the feudal serfdom model.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/weva2v/did_p...

we can see that as long as there were "expoitable resources" competition led to "good times".

as long as "software lordships" are competing for users, users tend to enjoy "lots of rights".

Re: CockroachDB license change

#264

Post by dang »

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…

Can you please not post in the flamewar style here? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: CockroachDB license change

#265

Post by karmakaze »

jen20 wrote: post #196
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.

CockroachDB Core has not been offered under an OSI (i.e. Open Source) license since 2019 - everything subsequently has either been under Business Source License or the Cockroach Community License.

I searched github and thought this[0] was it.

> Source code in this repository is variously licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL), the CockroachDB Community License (CCL), the MIT license, BSD-style licenses, and other licenses specified in the source code. Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and the copyright belongs to The Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file.

Is the caveat in this part (that I didn't catch before)? "Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and ..." That is sucky.

[0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach?tab=License-1-ov-fi...

Re: CockroachDB license change

#266

Post by jen20 »

zachmu wrote: post #239
bityard wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CockroachDB hasn't been an open source project in more than 5 years. They took down the blog post (I'd be curious to know why), but here is the announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr... What started as a neat project with a vibrant and enthusiastic community is now just another dull beige enterprise vendor.

The BSL doesn't make it closed source, it prevents a competitor from running their own DBaaS business using Cockroach as the backend. This has happened to various open source projects, AWS started selling their technology and ate their lunch. BSL is a totally fair compromise for commercial open source licensing imho. If you see BSL as the first step to an announcement like today's, that's a fair criticism. Not sure h…

The BSL is not an OSI-approved license, so it’s certainly not “open source” by the commonly used definition.

I agree it’s a reasonable license. But it’s not an open source license.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#267

Post by redwood »

I just don't understand why they didn't go with a copyleft license like SSPL; is it because they're worried too many people will self-manage in the Enterprise and not pay them?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#268

Post by redwood »

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...

How's their business growing compared to Cockroach?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#269

Post by redwood »

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…

Odd to see the market leader in this space not listed. It's "web scale"

Re: CockroachDB license change

#270

Post by redwood »

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

Well if the company can build a business then you can get great software to use... while in theory it would be great if a bunch of incredible software were done purely in the spirit of community open source, in practice that's pretty limited
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