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Relicensing CockroachDB

cockroachlabs.com

41–50 of 290 posts

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#41

And one more database removes itself from the Open Source community, and disqualifies itself as a dependency of other open projects.

So the open source community is about giving free labor to Amazon?

I've been an OSS user and contributor since the middle 1990s and I very much welcome these moves. SaaS has been getting a free (in the unfair sense) ride without contributing in any way.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#42

And one more database removes itself from the Open Source community, and disqualifies itself as a dependency of other open projects.

How does this move disqualify CRDB as a dependency of other open source projects?

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#43
post #4

This is more validation of the threat that cloud providers (mainly AWS) are to businesses built around open source products. Yes, AWS and others are legally permitted by existing open source licenses to create SaaS versions of these open source products, but with cloud computing becoming an increasingly winner-take-all market, it leaves little room for the software's authors to generate revenue via hosted offerings o…

The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. (And this was even a similar kind of disintermediation applied to authors as you see…

> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology.

> No license change will fix that.

Well, perhaps not a licence change, but if it's good enough that it's The One the provider wants, but it can't offer it under the terms of the licence, then paying for it under a separate licence could be a win for both parties.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#44
post #18

Even if cloud providers give back more than they take, there nothing legally stopping them from stealing an open source project as their own. The Business Source License (BSL) seems like a good reaction. What Amazon did to confluent.io and so many others seems pretty cold hearted.

Stealing an open source project would be like saying stealing quick sort. You can't steal something if it was given to the public domain.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#45

This is not the best way to compete with Amazon. The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. CockroachDB does "massive scale SQL without manual shading". BSL won't hinder Amazon offering those features too. If CockroachDB remained OSS, there would have been a chance of Amazon offering Elastic CockroachDB eventually, and at least make the Cockroach brand more popular. But n…

> If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do.

... run it somewhere other than Amazon?

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#46
post #4

This is more validation of the threat that cloud providers (mainly AWS) are to businesses built around open source products. Yes, AWS and others are legally permitted by existing open source licenses to create SaaS versions of these open source products, but with cloud computing becoming an increasingly winner-take-all market, it leaves little room for the software's authors to generate revenue via hosted offerings o…

The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. (And this was even a similar kind of disintermediation applied to authors as you see…

Is there a way to encourage AWS/GCP to contract major project maintainers for support? For example, could GCP set up a platform where maintainers of Postgres, Redis, ..., could sign up to be paid monthly, and perhaps to prioritize GCP issues when doing maintenance?

This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these popular tools.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#47

This is not the best way to compete with Amazon. The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. CockroachDB does "massive scale SQL without manual shading". BSL won't hinder Amazon offering those features too. If CockroachDB remained OSS, there would have been a chance of Amazon offering Elastic CockroachDB eventually, and at least make the Cockroach brand more popular. But n…

The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional.

If their feature set isn't a good differentiator from other databases, then their company isn't going to succeed in any situation.

This strategy is CockroachDB doing something that Amazon cannot do.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#48

This is not the best way to compete with Amazon. The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. CockroachDB does "massive scale SQL without manual shading". BSL won't hinder Amazon offering those features too. If CockroachDB remained OSS, there would have been a chance of Amazon offering Elastic CockroachDB eventually, and at least make the Cockroach brand more popular. But n…

>If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do.

That doesn't sound like competing

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#49

It's a good move and I even welcome it. However, I would have loved to see the removal of their enterprise version of the product at the same time. I love cockroachdb to death, but the key features that prevent me from using it in any real projects I'm doing are the backup/restore feature, which is currently locked behind their enterprise version. I also would love to use CDC and table partitioning. Nevertheless, gre…

Advanced backup restore is definitely blocked, but they do provide a `cockroach dump` utility, if that helps.

Re: Relicensing CockroachDB

#50
I’m still not sure why people open source great products then get outraged that someone else would simply resell the product and make money off of it, possibly even more than them.

When I put something out as open source, I’m doing it fully aware that I am leaving money on the table, but it will be worth it if a community of maintainers springs up around the project and ends up making it far better and more useful than I ever could alone. Then I could use that same project perhaps to do other things, which may lead to better money making opportunities.

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