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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

391–400 of 476 posts

Re: CockroachDB license change

#391

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…

> the problem with the Enterprise edition is that it's quite expensive Seems to me that it's still free for development, and small business use. If you're over $10M in revenue, with a business or product built on CockroachDB, they want a share of what they made possible. That seems totally reasonable to me.

You'd be a fool to put all your eggs in this basket:

> Annual term. Can be renewed subject to meeting the then-current eligibility requirements

Re: CockroachDB license change

#392
post #266

Earlier 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…

> but the OSI also rejected the SSPL

So did Debian and Red Hat. Do you think AWS leads them both?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#393

> Does this mean that CockroachDB is no longer open source? > CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license. While the new license is a proprietary enterprise license, the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions. The word you're looking for is "yes".

Coming next decade: companies marketing their product as "open source" because they have an empty GitHub repo for issues.

Or a repository with some source code under a free license, and then some .so and executables in a subdirectory. I'm looking at you Sciter.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#394
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.

MongoDB switched from AGPL to their own license when they couldn't compete with others offering their software as SaaS, so I don't think the GPL is any kind of protection from this. It's just that the GPL is less popular than alternatives for this type of business model.

That's a very good counter example. Although, I'd imagine, the latest AGPL version will be useful for a long time and any further progress in the code base would also be under AGPL, which would not be under risk of becoming an open core project.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#395
post #55
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…

If what you mean by "horizontal scale of writes" is a distributed database, then there is FoundationDB, which is one of the very few databases that offers strict serializability (see https://jepsen.io/consistency ). But it isn't quite comparable, because it isn't an easy-to-use shiny tool, rather a database-building toolkit (hence the name).

Most of the others listed are relational SQL databases, FoundationDB is a key-value store.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if AWS launches AWS Metrics which just takes your code and hosts it. You can't out compete Amazon here. I vastly prefer to use MIT or Apache code for my projects. It just makes things easier, but I also respect companies like yours have a right to seek a profit.

If Amazon will make a product on top of open-source VictoriaMetrics, then we'll say thanks to Amazon, since this is great marketing - more people will be aware of great products provided by VictoriaMetrics! There is close to zero probability that Amazon will pay us for this product, so there is no any sense in changing the license from Apache2 to some BSL-like license, since they never sign long-term contracts with o…

But if I could just go to Amazon directly,presumably they'd offer support, how do I give you money.

I just don't understand how for-profit company can develop true open source software. You can have a non profit foundation and a for profit support studio. Godot effectively does this.

Plus if you've taken VC money you can always get voted out in a few years. Or just have a nice exit. I wouldn't be mad at anyone for taking a large payday and retiring. But then the for profit company is free to change the license.

It feels more straightforward to use a proprietary or copy left license from the start. Your company exists to make money, and I think most of us can respect that. We just don't want to start building our projects off of open source software, that converts to some other license years down the road.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache isn't a silver bullet... there are plenty of Apache projects where the individuals are compromised mostly from one company and hide behind the veneer of the ASF... where they are working on the projects per their employment. Gerrymandering is definitely possible and has happened in the past, that's why you have to look at governance and ownership of the marks/build systems etc: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/1…

Agreed. Red Hat isn't perfect, but when I worked there we had a few products that were CNCF under my umbrella, including a few incubator projects. Even though we had several developers working full or part time on those projects, it was always something I was meaningful of, not stacking the project board Red Hat-heavy, to not make it a defacto RH project.

After the RedHat/Hyprland fiasco, it feels like RedHat is corrupt with SJW that are focused more on polics than on actual code

Re: CockroachDB license change

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It looks like[0] DoorDash is running theirs self-hosted and just on their cloud, not in the DC. At former gig we ran our much smaller clusters (largest one was ~10T and 20k qps) on kubernetes on cloud. Deployment/updates and what not wasn't difficult - the biggest difficulty was not accidentally overloading the DB from the application layer as always.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=97&v=jCjrfpF64Kc

Re: CockroachDB license change

#399
post #55
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…

If what you mean by "horizontal scale of writes" is a distributed database, then there is FoundationDB, which is one of the very few databases that offers strict serializability (see https://jepsen.io/consistency ). But it isn't quite comparable, because it isn't an easy-to-use shiny tool, rather a database-building toolkit (hence the name).

Not a distributed systems guy, but Spanner also offers that right? Or at least I'd assume they do considering they coordinate with actual clocks so you're naturally tied with real-time.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#400
post #131

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.

Which is exactly why we are back into Public Domain/Shareware kind of models, and GPL is an endangered license model, only some old school projects keep it around.

It will be even worse after the GPL developer generation is gone.

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