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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#271

Post by chrisoverzero »

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 doesn't make it closed source […]

Yes, that’s right!

> But BSL doesn't disqualify software from being open source.

No, that’s wrong: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html

> The Business Source License […] is not an Open Source license.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#272

Post by bigiain »

omoikane wrote: post #183
haolez wrote: 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…

You're kinda saying the same thing there.

As a developer, I don't want to rely on code from a project that "seems particularly profitable", because one day it's 100% certain they're going to start making their profit off me.

I'm _extremely_ wary of any "open source" projects that're VC funded, because the entire VC industry exists to make rich people richer at everybody else's expense, throwing a few bones at a few of the founders and a vanishingly small portion of the startup employees. As soon as they think that can get away with it because they have enough "free" open source users locked, they're gonna turn all the screws to chase the "100x or bust" exit strategy the VCs rely on. At the expense of everybody who foolishly built something on to of that project without an easy way to replace it.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#273

Post by redwood »

bcantrill wrote: post #206
turtle_heck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't Oxide using CockroachDB?

Yes, we are -- and it's worked well for us! (The most acute issue we hit was actually a gnarly OS issue[0][1].) That said, we are not currently a Cockroach Labs customer and we will not be becoming one for purposes of licensing CockroachDB. We are abiding by the terms of the BSL, and the version that we are on (22.1) will be Apache licensed in May 2025; by that point, we will maintain our own Apache-licensed fork for…

Outside Olobserver here... isn't it a huge distraction from your core mission to be maintaining a fork of a database engine? Why not just use something like MongoDB Community if you're trying to avoid paying for database and need a horizontally scalable distributed transactional system?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#274

Post by redwood »

dilyevsky wrote: post #208
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #78

I've never seen this database used by anyone in real life.

Is Netflix[0] real life enough? [0] - https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/

That's impressive. I'm genuinely surprised they have users at this scale. Are there others?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#275

Post by monero-xmr »

lucianbr wrote: post #213
haolez wrote: 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.

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 op…

Well what do you expect to maintain the mouse’s cloud servers, if not subscription revenue? The greed here!

Re: CockroachDB license change

#277

Post by bcantrill »

redwood wrote: post #273
bcantrill wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we are -- and it's worked well for us! (The most acute issue we hit was actually a gnarly OS issue[0][1].) That said, we are not currently a Cockroach Labs customer and we will not be becoming one for purposes of licensing CockroachDB. We are abiding by the terms of the BSL, and the version that we are on (22.1) will be Apache licensed in May 2025; by that point, we will maintain our own Apache-licensed fork for…

Outside Olobserver here... isn't it a huge distraction from your core mission to be maintaining a fork of a database engine? Why not just use something like MongoDB Community if you're trying to avoid paying for database and need a horizontally scalable distributed transactional system?

No -- but I will leave it to the RFD that I'm currently writing (and to the others that we will make public) to explain the rationale.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#278

Post by eikenberry »

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.

This is one reason to avoid any company run software that requires a CLA to contribute. No CLA makes it a lot harder to do this, at least if they have very much in the way of community contributions. Distributed ownership would keep them honest.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#279

Post by eikenberry »

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.

FSF requires signing of a CLA. A CLA would let them change the license to whatever they want, just like these companies. Some people were not happy with GPL3 yet that didn't stop the FSF from changing the licenses on their software.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#280

Post by broknbottle »

redwood wrote: post #269
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"

Ah you must be referring to /dev/nullDB?
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