Mandatory telemetry?
CockroachDB license change
341–350 of 476 posts
Re: CockroachDB license change
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 purp…
Mi d that those companies do dual licensing. All companies which worry about AGPL got to buy the commercial license to be on the safe side. While only the original vendor is able to do that, creating an imbalance between what they can do and an external contributor can do. (While external contributions are of limited interest for vendors who want to control a roadmap etc. and treat open source as marketing vehicle anyways)
Re: CockroachDB license change
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Embrace, extend, extinguish - AGPL makes it harder and SSPL even harder still.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> Unfortunately the Apache Foundation structure has some (an unspecified number greater than zero) "kill all the Muslims now!" Yuk. It is a trap to condem the foundation because of some people who are nasty outside the foundation If they were enabled to stand in the way of Mahdi Islam, or their mates participating then there would be a problem We have a problem in tech with naive fascists and fascist enablers. We mus…
I'm sorry but I cannot trust an organisation headed by people who want to exterminate Muslims. If you feel differently, that's on you, and I urge you to reconsider your feelings.
At first the behaviour should be condemned. If the person refuses to change the behaviour, the person is now at fault for choosing the behaviour which they know to be condemned.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#345Probably a good move. I'd looked at Cockroach before for a project - they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless, while Enterprise was some absolutely insane figure for a cash-strapped startup. While it was possible to hotfix the code to get around their restrictions - we eventually just used something else. This at least gets the full-fledged product in t…
The enterprise per core is still an insane figure, based on last time I interacted with sales- would be amazing if this was revised, too, to be more competitive with Planetscale, etc. Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.
It’s interesting to hear that CockroachDB is so much more expensive than Planetscale, since I thought planetscale was already prohibitively expensive.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#346Earlier 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…
Was he though? If we didn't have GPL perhaps at least our software and data would've still been on our computers instead of a privately owned cloud...
Re: CockroachDB license change
#347This made me wonder about postgres. Is Postgres at risk of being taken over by some corporate? What can we learn from all these free open-source databases that has gone enterprise commercial.
PostgreSQL's global, decentralized community, including companies like PostgreSQL Professional in Russia, makes a corporate takeover unlikely.
Even if the name is taken, the community and independent providers would carry on.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! I actually far prefer closed source software, made by non-VC funded companies, where there business is to create good software that actually adds value for the license I'm paying for. Something like Sublime Text or JetBrains. Sure can have people spend years of their life working on something, but release it as open source because VCs are paying for it, and that leads to more mindshare, but it leaves a bad taste…
I'm imagining that those closed source softwares wouldn't be possible without open source libraries and tools...
Correct. This is what makes me feel guilty about releasing a closed-source product, or even one with a non-OSI license. It’s irrational, but I feel like I’ve benefited so massively from FOSS that I owe it to the community to contribute back.
EDIT: as another commenter wrote below, OSI is driven by massive cloud vendors, who have a vested interest in having their freedoms to take projects and monetize them. Perhaps a somewhat restrictive license isn’t a bad thing.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> But if they are able to charge for it, they deserve it.
This is an extremely black-and-white view. If I make a competing product to you and it’s superior to yours, then yes, I deserve profits (though of course consumers may still choose yours for a litany of other reasons). If a trillion-dollar corporation becomes a competitor, that’s not exactly fair. They can, if they want, spin up an entire team dedicated to the product, and by sheer numbers, they will win. Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical? That’s subjective.
Re: CockroachDB license change
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 comp…
I hadn’t considered this angle, stupidly. Now I have to rethink a minor belief system.