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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#331

Post by chii »

monero-xmr wrote: post #275
lucianbr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

if the server was integral to the running of the service then yes, it makes sense to discontinue it when there's no more profit to be made.

However, increasingly more and more services which could've been an on-premises deployment become SAAS. This includes games (live services they call it). It is _designed_ to end, and designed to not be able to run locally.

Tell me who's the greedy one.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#332

Post by chii »

haolez wrote: post #295
omoikane wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are correct, but there is also an interesting phenomenon going on here: old school open source projects last longer. They end up being more reliable in the long term. It's kind of weird that the unprofitable option is the stable one.

> They end up being more reliable in the long term.

you're just seeing survivorship bias.

Plenty of them would've also disappeared, because their core contributor no longer wanted to give out free labour and moved on.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#333

Post by chii »

immibis wrote: post #319
kodablah wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

It's been popular in the last decade and a half to think that freedom is when everyone, including massive corporations, can do anything they want with your software, including closing it and taking away everyone else's freedom. Don't people think it would be better if they couldn't do that? People who value attention over principles are known as "pick mes" apparently.

> including closing it and taking away everyone else's freedom.

unless the corp owns the rights, they cannot "close it", nor take away everyone else's freedom. The old version that was open source licensed is always going to be available.

Unless you're talking about the additions these corporations made, which they keep closed, and charge you for it. But if they are able to charge for it, they deserve it.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#334

Post by hnarn »

It's honestly getting tiresome reading about yet another company that rides on the wave of open source for popularity and growth, but only for as long as it suits their own bottom line. Just like every other example, the page is filled to the brim with borderline unparsable marketing speak and, excuse my french, pure bullshit. Here's an example:

> we are updating our licensing model to better serve our diverse community of users

One could hope that whoever wrote this at least had the decency to blush while doing so. So here's what's actually happening, as I understand it at least:

CockroachDB used to be split into "Core" and "Enterprise". Core was Apache 2.0 licensed (open source), Enterprise was BSL (fake open source, "source available", bullshit). After three years, BSL code becomes real open source. This setup that they are sunsetting is already pretty restrictive, and is by no means uncontroversially "open source".

The New And Improved(tm) idea they have to "better serve" their "diverse community of users" is even worse: it's free as in beer to use, but other than that it's completely proprietary, and it also includes *mandatory telemetry* for non-paying users. Any reference to "open" in regards to this product is a complete lie, because being able to read the source code does not make a product open source -- Microsoft allows you to read their code too, if you sign a piece of paper with them.

I've never used CockroachDB, but I'm glad I saw this, because now I know there's a 0% chance I will ever consider using it.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#335

Post by LtdJorge »

jen20 wrote: post #266
zachmu wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It even says it is not an open source license right in the license

Re: CockroachDB license change

#336

Post by redwood »

dilyevsky wrote: post #303
redwood wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess most of the larger deployments are self-managed rather than their SaaS offering... Do you think this is mostly running on top of hyperscaler infrastructure? Or in traditional enterprise data centers? I'm just surprised because I never see it

Re: CockroachDB license change

#337

Post by redwood »

bcantrill wrote: post #277
redwood wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look forward to reading it

Re: CockroachDB license change

#338

Post by m463 »

hnarn wrote: post #334

It's honestly getting tiresome reading about yet another company that rides on the wave of open source for popularity and growth, but only for as long as it suits their own bottom line. Just like every other example, the page is filled to the brim with borderline unparsable marketing speak and, excuse my french, pure bullshit. Here's an example: > we are updating our licensing model to better serve our diverse commun…

That's the problem with the term "open source". It is ambiguous and can mean anything from public domain to source available. If you just allow people to look at the source, you can call it "open source" and nobody can really argue.

If you did that and called it GPL, things would be different.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#339

Post by immibis »

jen20 wrote: post #266
zachmu wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OSI is a consortium of cloud platform vendors (really - check for yourself). Of course they'll define open source in a way that excludes licenses that restrict them from turning your work into closed-source cloud platforms. The good news is that we're not beholden to their definition as they have no official status whatsoever. We don't have to believe them just because they put the words Open Source in their company name.

The BSL is clearly not open source since it requires approval from the licensor in certain applications, but the OSI also rejected the SSPL, which is just an extended AGPL that requires source code publication in even more cases, and is clearly open source because of that.

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