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CockroachDB license change

cockroachlabs.com

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Re: CockroachDB license change

#61

Post by ensignavenger »

dzonga wrote: post #42

predictable and pretty good business move. these things are easy to evaluate - 1. what's your appetite in running infra ? low - then use the SAAS offering 2. doable - then use a db that has good scalable solutions in this case mysql -> vitess since those products don't come from a database vendor. mongo might qualify too

Whats your appetite for a SaaS vendor unpredictably and without enough warning changing the price they are charging you, or pushing updates to the SaaS that break your business? Better get it put into the contract.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#62

Post by john-flu-fix »

ensignavenger wrote: post #51
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone creating free software and changing the license on software they created isn't a "rug pull" in any sense of the word. You paid $0 and contributed nothing. What rug is being pulled? A rug pull is when you buy into something and then it's taken away, like when a cryptocurrency token is busted out or you spend money on something and then it's cancelled or nerfed. Don't like it? Write your own distributed fault t…

It is described as a rugpull because of the marketing around it being open source. Coackroach however was never open source, it was BSL licensed. This change does appear to mean that old versions will no longer eventually convert to open source, though. Thus it would be up to the the BSL promoters and marketers to decide whether or not this is a rugpull. As an open source user and proponent, I don't really care.

Cockroach hasn’t marketed itself as open source for years

Re: CockroachDB license change

#63

Post by sidewndr46 »

jwr wrote: post #55
geenat wrote: 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).

What? FoundationDB disappeared down the memory hole whenever Apple acquired them.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#64

Post by yawboakye »

andrewmutz wrote: post #53
AYBABTME wrote: post #28

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…

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.

start open/source available has become a trend among yc-backed startups lately. one wonders how long before a “well, actually, we need a business-y license.”

Re: CockroachDB license change

#65

Post by dathinab »

geenat wrote: post #23
sho wrote: post #10

Probably 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.

through cash strapped startups can now use the "free" enterprise version until they reach 10M$ annual revenue

weather it's a good idea to commit to it if you might not want to afford it once your revenue went up is another matter

and 10M$ annually is not little but also no absurdly huge, I mean a ~80 person company probably will struggle to be profitable with that revenue (if it's 80 good paying jobs like software developer).

Re: CockroachDB license change

#66

Post by AYBABTME »

candiddevmike wrote: post #50
AYBABTME wrote: post #28

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…

There is no abuse here. They released software under a specific license (BSL at that, plenty of opportunities to restrict).

It can be construed as "abuse" if another commercial entity is deriving value from the core license while Cockroach Labs doesn't get to enjoy a "fair" share of this created value, while pouring its own resources into a product that enables this value creation.

I think CR Labs needs to make money from their activities. However they do it, should be in a way that incentivizes a win-win for them and their customers. Right now I think they attempted to "correct" for the uncaptured value, but the game theory switched toward discouraging adoption (in my perspective). I may be wrong, probably am.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#67

Post by theamk »

api wrote: post #22
ko_pivot wrote: post #14

As much as this has the vibes of a classic OSS rug pull, as a Cockroach user, I don’t really take it that way. First of all, it was already not open source and secondly, the free to use version was missing key features like follower reads and incremental backups.

Someone creating free software and changing the license on software they created isn't a "rug pull" in any sense of the word. You paid $0 and contributed nothing. What rug is being pulled? A rug pull is when you buy into something and then it's taken away, like when a cryptocurrency token is busted out or you spend money on something and then it's cancelled or nerfed. Don't like it? Write your own distributed fault t…

CockroachDB raised >$500M in funding, and a big reason for this was it's high number of users. That high number would be a lot lower if it wasn't a free software.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#68

Post by PeterZaitsev »

Finally all Open Source pretense is dropped. CockroachDB becomes Enterprise+Cloud database company with a free tier, not dissimilar from Oracle.

The revenue driver as a driver for freemium tier is interesting as it seems like it would require company to regularly disclose their revenue to CockroachDB which looks intrusive.

Re: CockroachDB license change

#69

Post by red_admiral »

_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 Privacy Policy" ... wait, what?

Re: CockroachDB license change

#70

Post by hansihe »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #63
jwr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What? FoundationDB disappeared down the memory hole whenever Apple acquired them.

It's still open source and actively maintained by Apple, they use it internally.

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb

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