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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#301

Post by tsimionescu »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #165
mixmastamyk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately you can't do commercial licenses unless you take full ownership of each and every source contribution. So, it means there is zero guarantees the project stays open. AGPL without that is a non starter for commercial usage.

Some of the most popular database and database related projects & products have been or are AGPL. MongoDB became massively successful as AGPL from the start. Grafana has been AGPL for 3+ years.

The AGPL is absolutely viable in commercial contexts. There are a handful of companies that have hangups about it, but the industry overall has long since realized that it is almost identical to the GPL for most practical purposes.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#302

Post by tsimionescu »

ted_dunning wrote: post #155
warvariuc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You paid $0 and contributed nothing I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".

From the standpoint of the people paying the developers of said software, it is exactly like paying $0.

No, it's not. If they're planning a rug pull, they very much care that you took effort to integrate their free offering into your infrastructure, because they care that you're sitting firmly on the rug before they can pull it.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#303

Post by dilyevsky »

redwood wrote: post #274
dilyevsky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I heard that doordash ran a cluster serving >1M qps, there maybe still a setup at square/block where the team originated from

Re: CockroachDB license change

#304

Post by tsimionescu »

osigurdson wrote: post #152

I think the reality is, only exceeding common codebases (Linux and Postgres for example), can survive with an open source model. If the value created by the product is 1M times greater than the costs, fine, a way to support it will materialize. Otherwise, economics take over and people need to get paid. The fact that source is publicly available is largely irrelevant.

I don't think the point is how common it is, it's about a organizational model.

Linux and Postgres are not reliant on any one commercial entity being successful for their continued existence. Even many of the maintainers are not reliant: if the company/foundation Linus Torvalds is working for at the moment has to close down, someone else will pay him to keep working on Linux. And even if he couldn't personally work on Linux anymore, there are enough other people in a similar position that Linux won't die.

I'm sure there are many much smaller and more obscure projects in a similar boat, especially in academia. If the code is not dependent on a single entity for maintenance, both in terms of someone knowing it and in terms of someone paying for it, then it will naturally thrive for a very long time.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#305

Post by mikeyouse »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #300
timcobb wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more popular than the Apache Foundation? I thought Apache was top... Is there a cooler/better Apache? If so, please let me know. And when was Apache more popular? I thought it was the uncool place where stuff was written in Java, that became popular because people's conception of Java (and the language/ecosystem itself) changed.

I think CNCF is home to most of the big projects I’ve been contributing to or using lately.

CNCF is a project of the Linux Foundation - which has become absolutely massive: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects

Re: CockroachDB license change

#307

Post by WatchDog »

red_admiral wrote: post #69
_joel wrote: post #39

Enforced telemetry for free users? That's gross.

Not only that, but according to the licence agreement, there are "technical countermeasures" to stop you from using the product if you were to block telemetry with a firewall (presumably it stops working if the telemetry server doesn't send back an acknowledgement), and "You understand and agree that Licensor may use and disclose personal information collected as part of Telemetry in accordance with Licensor's Privac…

They have indicated that they will continue to make the source available.

Assuming you pay for a license, does the license prevent you from building your own fork, and patching out the telemetry code?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#308

Post by infogulch »

LaserToy wrote: post #247
skunkworker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh the joys of "Contact Sales" pricing strategy, where made up rates are no more consistent than "whatever the sales rep thinks they can extract from the business".

Re: CockroachDB license change

#310

Post by skunkworker »

LaserToy wrote: post #247
skunkworker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From what I remember, the cost per server per year was about 5x to 6x (annually) the hardware cost of a new server, and these were dual 32 core EPYCs. 64 cores per box at per core licensing gets really expensive.
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