15 ms·

Relicensing CockroachDB

487 points by SEJeff 7y ago

revskill 7y ago
The interesting thing is that, some of AWS products have weird name (hard to remember, strange or new), while it's actually built from OSS.
quotemstr 7y ago
So they're taking their product proprietary. They're not the first to try this move. They won't be the last. It never works. This change guarantees one of two outcomes: 1) CockroachDB becomes irrelevant, as cloud providers stop providing it, or 2) a FOSS implementation of CockroachDB's API (perhaps based on the last FOSS CockroachDB release) becomes dominant.
- im_down_w_otp 7y ago
  3) The cloud provider forks at the version under the previous license, continues to iterate on it by adding valuable features that are exposed to users, which the OSS version won't have, and now the OSS vendor is playing both marketplace & technical catch-up at the same time and with each reinforcing the downside of the other. Effectively forcing original innovator into the position of being a fast-follower.
  - senderista 7y ago
    You mean like what AWS did with Elastic?
    - _msw_ 7y ago
      No. In that case, AWS built and released new Apache licensed, 100% open source extensions for Elasticache to make essential functionality like TLS encryption and authentication available to anyone. It did not fork Elasticsearch, it released a collection of software that works with the OSS core version of Elasticsearch. Disclosure: I work at AWS on EC2, and sometimes provide my opinion on open source topics to other teams.
makapuf 7y ago
Unrelated, but it never occurred to me that cockroachdb and gimp were made by the same persons ! Kudos ! (If I'm not mistaken)
- sbuttgereit 7y ago
  Over in PostgreSQLand ... Tom Lane is an important member of the PostgreSQL core team and also was involved in the PNG image format (and other graphics related efforts).
  - tus87 7y ago
    Yeah well the guy who wrote qemu also did ffmpeg.
- jsvcycling 7y ago
  Wow you're right, I just looked it up. Very nice!
  - tombert 7y ago
    Something that came as a surprise to me was the fact that QEMU and FFMpeg are made by the same guy as well. Kind of depressing; either one of those projects has that person set for life in the job market, and that jerk has both! How am I supposed to compete with that? EDIT: Just a note, I say this with all the love in the world, and certainly wish no ill-will towards Fabrice. I hope my dumb joke above didn't come off as hostile...I think it's pretty cool that one person was able to build two apps that I use daily.
- neonate 7y ago
  For the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Kimball_(computer_programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Kimball_(computer_prog...
chuckgreenman 7y ago
This is pretty interesting, I'm thinking about how edge cases will be handled. Consider a product like Airtable: at present I think most people would classify it as a consumer productivity tool. Firebase on the other end would be a platform as a service. Airtable is adding features that make it more of a platform as a service. I wonder where the line will be drawn for the new BSL.
- penagwin 7y ago
  I have a feeling it comes down to how it's exposed, and who is "using" cockroachDB. If Airtable uses cockroachDB then that's fine. The issue is when the cockroachDB is the product that the customer pays for.
- bdarnell 7y ago
  (Cockroach Labs founder) The details are in the "additional usage grant" clause: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028ce1d81a9b1148f7e9ba2673bf95/licenses/BSL.txt#L8-L16 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028c... We decided to draw the line at whether the end user has direct control over table schemas. If users can specify the schema to be used, it's a database service and needs a license. If you're fitting everything into a generic schema (even if the user can specify things that look like new columns in the UI), it's an application and doesn't need a special license.
  - amenod 7y ago
    Genius! Very clear line! I wish you all the luck on this endeavour, I really believe the time has come to move a bit away from strict open-source.
  - easel 7y ago
    As a startup founder and CTO who has had to deal with getting (or not getting) such licenses through legal, I really appreciate the clarity of definition here. Typically the language tends to be vague around "derivative works as a service" which conservative lawyers treat as a risk. Well done.
  - 7y ago
dhd415 7y ago
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 of their software. If you think that the Cockroach Labs, Redis Labs, Mongos, Elastics, etc., of the world provide a net benefit to the software world, I think you have to contend with the fact that there is going to be fewer such companies in the future if AWS keeps eating their lunch.
- fossuser 7y ago
  It'd be interesting if there was a way to specifically require AWS, Azure, Google Cloud (or more generally any cloud hosting reseller) to pay if they use the open source software or any derivative of it (or if they create any company which then uses it) for the purposes of reselling it to others. Basically give the open source project a 30% cut if you're going to resell it (or fork and resell it). It might be hard to do now since with AWS since with ES Amazon just forked whatever version was already permissively licensed, but it may be interesting to create a new license to protect against this for new OSS projects.
  - nradov 7y ago
    You can put any license on your software that you want, but a license that required revenue sharing wouldn't really count as "open source".
    - alfonsodev 7y ago
      I understand what you mean and totally agree with you, I just feel the need to remind (not to you) the term free software, as many things are open source but not free software [1] [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
jacquesm 7y ago
Maybe a good time to change the name as well? Funny names are cute and all but if you want to gain mainstream acceptance for your database product CockroachDB is not the one I would have picked. Downvoters: if you think names for products do not matter you are mistaken.
- ummonk 7y ago
  I think it would be a bad name for a consumer product but this isn’t a consumer product. CockroachDB invokes a feeling of resilience which is perfect for marketing to engineers.
- ziddoap 7y ago
  >CockroachDB is not the one I would have picked. What would you have picked, master namer? What criteria determines what the mainstream will accept? "Mongo" seems like a bit of a funny name to me, but they seem to be doing alright... What makes Mongo okay but Cockroach not? Apple is a cute name. Does it pass your test?
  - TheresaBraccio 7y ago
    ^ nice 'Name of the Wind' reference
- reificator 7y ago
  > Downvoters: if you think names for products do not matter you are mistaken. Disagreeing with your particular opinions on a particular name doesn't imply a belief that names don't matter.
  - juped 7y ago
    You shouldn't downvote to disagree!
    - reificator 7y ago
      In fairness I didn't vote on that post, but I was assuming downvotes were for disagreement.
louis-paul 7y ago
Recently discussed with somebody at a major cloud provider and IIRC their response was in essence “I think we’re doing them a favor: ask Neo4j about our release of [hosted graph database service]. We’ve taken a share of their business, but the overall market is much bigger, and they’re doing great. Our hosted products are not even the most polished in the market, and companies like Elastic can easily be compete with us.” Thoughts?
- gregwebs 7y ago
  Yes, some cloud providers readily suggest competing with them by making something better. In the end, the DB is still running on their infrastructure (required to keep the customer's latency low) and they are still capturing profit even if it is not as much as their DBaaS profit. There is a problem though that a DBaaS provider is still at an inherent disadvantage. You aren't in the AWS/GCP cli tool and APIs. And the DBaaS has to setup VPC peering across accounts, which has some inherit limitations (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP).
  - merb 7y ago
    > (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP) actually you do not need DNS resolution on GCP since you can actually have a high available IP way easier (which is way better). in AWS it's also possible to have a highly available IP, but it's way harder to do so.
- maxdemarzi 7y ago
  Sure. Amazon Neptune is garbage, but that's not the issue. They are competing fair and square here. The problem is when they fork <insert liberally licensed open source project> completely.
- bch 7y ago
  Years ago I heard the same from a Postgres-contractor friend who said amazons ready-to-go (now RDS, but iirc, back then just MySQL; I don’t recall the service brand name - maybe also RDS) SQL service was welcome, because it sucked. Its not clear to me though that 1) it would stay “sucky” 2) users would make the distinction my friend did. I’m worried it’d play out where Amazon would vacuum up the “low end” part of the market and the “high end” would further have to be competed for, because Joes Expert RDBMS Service v Amazon.
hartator 7y ago
> The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. How much a SaaS has to do to not be consider as selling CockroachDB as is? These questions apart is worth noting that AWS can still copy CockroachDB APIs, rename it AWS Ants, and called it a day.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  The "API" you are referring to is known as SQL, transmitted over the wire using the pgsql protocol. There's nothing to copy. The magic of Cockroach is in the implementation.
  - hartator 7y ago
    Not sure why they changed their license then. Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB?
    - ComputerGuru 7y ago
      Yes, it is indeed a little puzzling. CrB's biggest benefit is to people not interested in engineering their own scaling/sharing solutions for existing RDBMS options or if they care about optimal resource utilization (under a certain subset of conditions), neither of which are particularly draws for the AWS team. Perhaps they are more worried about other vendors.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB? They have actual managed Postgres with RDS for Postgres, and also a Postgres-compatible (SQL dialect and wire protocol) version of RDS Aurora.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  That's what makes this even more puzzling. Is there demand for CRDB-flavored SQL features?
haney 7y ago
I wasn't able to find a link to the new license in the blog post but it is in their github repo for anyone interested https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/licenses/BSL.txt https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/license...
makkesk8 7y ago
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, great product.
- napsterbr 7y ago
  Never used CRDB so this question may make no sense, but given it builds upon Postgres (AFAIU), couldn't you use any of the many backup solutions Pg offers?
  - jsty 7y ago
    It uses the Postgres wire protocol, but isn't based on Postgres under the hood
  - ansible 7y ago
    CRDB is compatible with the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use existing database drivers (in C#, Golang, whatever) to talk to a CRDB instance. The SQL itself is slightly different (no two databases are the same these days), so that would have to be adjusted. If your backup solution is fine with "SELECT * FROM table1; SELECT * FROM table2; ..." you can use the client interface for backups. But usually you want to a snapshot of the entire database at some (self-consistent!) point in time, and back up that.
    - napsterbr 7y ago
      This makes more sense, thanks. I just realized I mistook cockroachdb for timescaledb.
    - olavgg 7y ago
      Would ZFS snapshots work? It is what I use to backup PostgreSQL, much easier and faster than ordinary backup
iblaine 7y ago
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.
- DVassallo 7y ago
  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.
  - vageli 7y ago
    > 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. Most open source projects are not given to the public domain, but encumbered with clauses in the form of their license.
    - DVassallo 7y ago
      Permissive licenses are basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity.
    - paxys 7y ago
      And none of the companies are breaching the license.
  - iblaine 7y ago
    Quicksort is an algorithm, a copyright on it would not hold up, but a creative use of it may hold up. Kafka is not part of the public domain, but available through an open source license, that AWS is arguably exploiting to make some money off the back of open source contributors.
    - DVassallo 7y ago
      True, but for all intents and purposes, it's basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity: "Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form." https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE#L67-L72 https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE#L67-L72
docapotamus 7y ago
Well played cockroachlabs. I find it awkward being an AWS user and knowing there products are something else under the hud, even when they do use the product name. It leads to user lock in, which is what they want. These addendum to licenses are what the world needs. Not sure it would work for certain products, like BSDs though, although they seem to get a lot more back from those who use them in products (Netflix is a good example)
JoshTriplett 7y ago
And one more database removes itself from the Open Source community, and disqualifies itself as a dependency of other open projects.
- api 7y ago
  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.
  - jasonlotito 7y ago
    No, the open source community is not about giving free labor to Amazon. But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about members of the open source community taking free labor from the community and then pulling back on the open source promise. As someone in the same boat, I'd hate to see a project I contributed to change it's license to something that limits how the applications can be used. If something is licensed as MIT, I expect it to stay MIT. Furthermore, the presumption that users of the software are now required to contribute back flies in the face of the agreement. I'm not against people using a license like this. It does however seems a slap in the face to change the license after benefiting from the fact that you are releasing an open source product. tl;dr: It's a bait and switch, and dislike it.
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      It also pulls the rug out from under other projects depending on them.
      - amenod 7y ago
        Not really. The limit is clearly defined (if you are using it as DB, there is no change). If you allow users to create schemas, then it's a different thing, but I'm guessing there is no such project.
    - 7y ago
DVassallo 7y ago
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 now it will likely be an Aurora feature. If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do.
- api 7y ago
  > If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do. ... run it somewhere other than Amazon?
  - DVassallo 7y ago
    lol. True, but not much to differentiate on that unfortunately, unless they're able to point out something fundamentally wrong with the Amazon platform.
    - api 7y ago
      Cost? Single point of failure? Data residency laws? Lock in? Just saying there's definitely a market for a database I can run.
      - DVassallo 7y ago
        Yes I agree. They just need to find a good business model for self-hosting though.
- lacker 7y ago
  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.
xwdv 7y ago
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.
- dhuramas 7y ago
  Does that mean we shouldn't revisit our decisions and all your decisions should be set in stone? CockroachDB tried something. It seems to not be working- so they are changing. It's not as if they are doing it retroactively.
  - paxys 7y ago
    Does everyone who has contributed to this project over the years have a say in this decision? My code itself will also be relicensed, whether I like it or not.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      You actually have the right to appeal that decision, because you own your contributed code. (unless you already agreed in advance through a Contributor License Agreementt.)
  - verisimilitudes 7y ago
    >It's not as if they are doing it retroactively. You can't do this retroactively.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  The outrage is mostly driven by companies that took millions in VC money. VC-fueled open source would always need to find a way to monetize, and "bait and switch" by changing licenses is a tried and true strategy.
tus87 7y ago
> or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service Great so I will write a little shim that loads libcockroach and call it TermiteDB and I'm set.
- otterley 7y ago
  Intent matters in the law, and judges see right through transparent attempts to evade the spirit of agreements on a frequent basis. They aren't stupid.
didibus 7y ago
I'm all for businesses coming up with whatever licensing terms they want. That said, as a user, it'll be a harder sell if I can't easily understand or validate what the license permits and doesn't. For example, with their new license, could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? Or what if I'm not offering cockroachDB as a service directly, but the service I'm building and offering as a service can still be argued to be some sort of data-store?
- amenod 7y ago
  The way I understand it, the whole idea of this relicensing is that you can no longer take someone else's work and build your business competing with them. So no, you can't do that. Seems fair enough to me.
  - didibus 7y ago
    Right, but now there's this ambiguity about what counts as competing. And that ambiguity sounds like a risk to business, which opens a door to potential liabilities if CockroachLabs were ever to believe you are competing. That in turn makes CockroachDB a harder sell to management.
    - amenod 7y ago
      True. Though in this case it's very admirable how cleanly they have specified the exception case. But yes, it is a harder sell, and this is the main issue that these licenses must solve if they want to be successful.
- toyg 7y ago
  > could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? If you were to do that, even with current licenses, you probably couldn't call it CockroachDB anyway.
  - didibus 7y ago
amenod 7y ago
Hm, wasn't one of the conditions to use BSL (the name of the license) that one of the "Change licenses" must be GPL? I remember distinctly because while I liked BSL, I never understood why I couldn't use AGPL as fallback (which would be much better suited to my use case). EDIT: It seems I was wrong: > To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version. Licensor may specify additional Change Licenses without limitation. https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ So Apache is OK, because such software can be incorporated into GPL app. AGPL is not, because it places additional restrictions.
didibus 7y ago
Could someone say just take a normal open source license, like MIT, and just add a provision saying, if you are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, this license doesn't apply to you and you are not permitted to use the code in any way? Basically, just blacklist certain companies that compete with you directly.
- amenod 7y ago
  It's still not free/open/libre source anymore, because you are discriminating against someone, so it's not in-line with the set of freedoms as defined by both OSI and FSF. Whether this matters to you or not is another question, of course... :)
  - didibus 7y ago
    Hum, I feel there's some ambiguity there. Like FSF says from here https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html: > A free program must offer the four freedoms to any user that obtains a copy of the software, provided the user has complied thus far with the conditions of the free license covering the software. It's unclear what "obtains a copy" means. You could make it that certain companies are not allowed to "obtain a copy", and thus if they do, it is through illegitimate means. For example, it goes to length to say Free software does not mean gratis. So I'd suspect it would claim that if software is sold, and you pirate the copy instead of paying for it, you have broken the conditions of the free license. But if you paid, and a copy is delivered to you, from that point on, the four set of freedoms are granted to you over the copy that was given. So, I can see something where, it is gratis, but obtaining the copy is not granted to everyone, but only to some, depending on if you're a potential competitor or not. And that seems like it could still fall under that definition of Free Software.
    - amenod 7y ago
      Sure - except that under their definition of freedoms you are allowed to share software with anyone, so while you can sell it to the first person, they can freely share it with anyone. But truly, I don't think looking for holes in definition of freedom would help anyone. The question if, do these definitions achieve what we have set out to do, and in what way? If yes, great. If not, maybe the time has come to define another set of freedoms, which still protect users better than closed source, but allow developers and maintainers to make money from their creations. And yes, they will not be open source, so we might as well come up with a different term.
k__ 7y ago
I had the impression cloud providers like AWS would move to using their own core services to emulate other systems and not host the original thing.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  They already have - Amazon has Aurora, which has MySQL and Postgres compatibility. I'm sure if there's enough demand, Amazon will add CockroadDB compatibility to Aurora in the not-too-distant future.
  - mixedCase 7y ago
    > Amazon has Aurora, which has MySQL and Postgres compatibility Which lags behind upstream in versioning and has its own quirks. Or Redshift, which is still stuck in Postgres 8 and absolutely has its own quirks.
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      > Which lags behind upstream in versioning and has its own quirks. No doubt re-implentation will lag and will not be perfect (either buggy, or not buggy enough to match reference). The big question: is it AWS users shopping for DBs, or MySQL/Postgres/CockroachDB users shopping for *aaS services? I suspect the former outnumber the latter, and they will likely tolerate being behind the bleeding edge.
      - mixedCase 7y ago
        I think it's still the majority of developers that first deal with databases outside a cloud environment and then want a managed version of it in their environment (which btw, Amazon does offer in RDS Postgres/MySQl, but it's their forks that have these problems). And being behind the bleeding edge is problematic at least these days that databases are incorporating great features, but the bigger problem is incompatibility and subtle differences. Those are the truly annoying issues.
- StreamBright 7y ago
gtirloni 7y ago
CockroachDB is an excellent project but it doesn't have the massive adoption that would prompt AWS/Azure/GCP to implement it as a managed service. Companies are much more likely to just go with AWS Aurora than to consider CockroachDB at this point. I'm still amazed as how promising open source projects continue to undermine themselves with this "commons clause" movement. I hope something good comes out of it but I'm pessimistic.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  Why would this undermine their efforts? It seems totally reasonable to say "You can't just sell a hosted version of this yourself". Anyone who was planning to use Cockroach still can, it even seems that you could be a CockroachDB shop that provides consulting services, so long as you don't manage and host it.
  - gtirloni 7y ago
    Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc). For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.
    - filereaper 7y ago
      >Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. I don't think this is the case, a third party can provide hosted CockroachDB provided they license it from Cockroach Labs. >"The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license." Again, IANAL.
      - gtirloni 7y ago
        Good point. We shall wait and see how that turns out. Right now their sales chat can't say how much that would cost. It seem an alternative could be to provide something like a cPanel-like thing that would enable other companies to easily offer CockroachDB DBaaS solutions. That's adding value rather than subtracting.
gtirloni 7y ago
If you have this page open, please beware of your battery. It's currently consuming 200% CPU whenever it has focus.
- PetahNZ 7y ago
  Works fine for me.
archit3cture 7y ago
It is nice to see that CockroachDB's team keep their original vision of creating a long term open source "commons" of their database. What I don't totally understand when I take my developer's hat is why the split between "enterprise" features under CCL and core features under APL/BSL is kept. Without the "enterprise" features, CRDB does not feel like beeing totally open source and open source users are sort of second-zone users. Are open-source fans supposed to write clean-room implementations of the features (would it even make sense in the licencing model CRDB uses) ? It would also be nice to have a licencing clause where a change of ownership of CockRoach Labs or the bailout of the company would trigger a licence change for the enterprise features (maybe even after N years). But as I said congrats on the product and all the best in your commercial endeavour ! may this licence change open new cloud opportunities !
buckminster 7y ago
So BSL now means "Boost Software License" and "Business Source License". That's not confusing.
bithavoc 7y ago
Good for CockroachDB, they need to make money. I understand I'm not their target user though, I stopped using them when they released Follower-Reads as an enterprise feature. I'm back to Postgres for now but I can't stop thinking about the opportunity CRDB is missing by not releasing the enterprise features as part of the BSL-licensed core, that way I can use them from the very beginning(when I have no money) and when I grow and have traction, money and what not, then I can pay to scale beyond X amount of nodes/capacity a la MemSQL[0]. [0] https://www.memsql.com/blog/announcing-memsql-free-tier/ https://www.memsql.com/blog/announcing-memsql-free-tier/
- espadrine 7y ago
  > I stopped using them when they released Follower-Reads as an enterprise feature. I read Cockroach Labs’ strategy to be good on single nodes, great on single-datacentre cluster, phenomenal worldwide. They offer single-DC features open-source, and worldwide enterprise-only. Apart from SQL features, their open-source cluster offer seems superior to PostgreSQL. Sure, they do not have follower-reads, but neither does PG (which does not even have AS OF SYSTEM TIME, a prerequisite), and it is only beneficial with multi-DC. Reads are still distributed by range, so there is no particular negative compared to Postgres. Why was Follower-Reads a dealbreaker?
  - bithavoc 7y ago
    I'm not necessarily exhausting the physical capacity of a single datacenter to expand to another datacenter, I may expand early or from day one to run queries closer to the user even if the workload is a few seconds behind. I don't think Follow-the-workload works well for that scenario.
zem 7y ago
this seems like an excellent licence, clearly spelling out the intent of the copyright, rather than trying to fashion a one-size-fits-all set of rules. it reminds me of cory doctorow's point that, intuitively, if some community theatre wanted to dramatise one of his works, they should be able to just do so, but if a major hollywood studio wanted to film it they should require a licence, and it is hard to draft a copyright law that does this properly.
stingraycharles 7y ago
It’s interesting to see the mindset over here at HN change over the year. I recall when MongoDB introduced their “commons clause”, RedisLabs did the relicensing and ElasticSearch doing the dual license open source code, there was quite some outrage over here. I guess everyone is accepting that these clouds are in fact major threats to these projects, as providing these databases as a service is pretty much the only realistic way to get decent revenue numbers. I think it’s good that CockroachDB is preemptively doing this, now that it has become more acceptable a practice.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  Discussion fatigue is a thing.
  - kodablah 7y ago
    Agreed. I disagree with the change and have made my comments in the other situations about taking the good with the bad when you give something away. Just no need to keep harping on it, doesn't mean mindset has shifted.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Part of it is that companies are getting better at it. There is no attempt at confusion over what "open source" means in this announcement, and automatically converting to open source in three years is clever. I don't see anything to object to, do you?
  - mritchie712 7y ago
    GCP just started offering Postgres v11 in beta in April and it was released on 2018-10-18. They skipped v10 (released October 5, 2017). Comparing to Postgres, three years feels like the right balance (i.e. in the zone a cloud provider would want to offer it).
- BillinghamJ 7y ago
  Imo the key difference here is that they're owning the decision and not trying to paper over the fact that it is no longer OSI Open Source. The three year change is also a big deal in my mind. Would make me a lot more comfortable to adopt knowing it is absolutely guaranteed to become OSI Open Source later.
galaxyLogic 7y ago
Mongo is doing great for an OS product. Wonder if CRDB is trying to take a lesson from their playbook. https://www.google.com/search?q=mongo+db+capitalization&oq=mongo+db+capitalization&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.6033j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=mongo+db+capitalization&oq=m...
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I wish them well but fear this won't work out for them. This sounds like a smart move until you realize that they are just one of many players in a crowded market and that this actually decreases their value proposition for end users and external contributors. Having less of both is bad news for an OSS project, no matter how you spin it. The way I see it this type of company has a short term value that derives from them being first (more or less) to market with whatever it is they do well. In this case, their thing is having a sharded/clustered db that can replicate across datacenters and with serialized transactions. Awesome, that's a great thing to have and it will take other databases a while to get there. But they will eventually and that matters. This stuff commoditizes quite rapidly. It's based on published research by Google half a decade ago and people can look at the source code and algorithms. It's just a matter of time before somebody else figures out how to replicate what they do in some other product. Somebody like e.g. the postgresql developers: https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/07/postgresql-concurrency-isolation-and-locking/ https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/07/postgresql-concurrency-isol... and https://pgdash.io/blog/postgres-11-sharding.html https://pgdash.io/blog/postgres-11-sharding.html. It's probably not perfect yet but they are obviously heading the same direction and there's a notion of good enough and diminishing returns. When it does catch up, it all reverts to which is the best product in the market. Part of that is features but another part of that is a robust developer community and having access to robust support and hosting options from multiple companies. A failing VC backed company that controls the code base and treats it like a walled garden means that community is only as good as that single company behind it, i.e. not very good. It simultaneously repels potential users and contributors thus slowing down adoption and development speed while increasing the R&D burden for the single backing company to not fall behind any further. They can't win that game. In a nutshell, postgresql does not have that problem and it never will. Mysql doesn't have that problem either. Both developer ecosystems consist of collaborating frenemies that work together because it is better than not doing so. Both provide pretty good database solutions with plenty of hosted solutions (including Amazon and other cloud providers), commercial support via several companies, etc. Also both are pretty much guaranteed to continue to have active development for as long as there are people willing to sell their time doing that and there are so many companies using both that there is just no way that that would change within the next few decades or most likely this century. Essentially all of the current companies behind both could go bankrupt and all that would do is create an opportunity for new companies to step in and take over.
PeterZaitsev 7y ago
CockroachDB has raised over $50M of Venture capital which obviously pushes them on the "grow revenue fast" track, which is much easier if you do not have competition from the cloud vendors. I think there is so much black and white positioning of this issue - competition from AWS does not eliminate revenue for the project, but reduces it, by a lot. It may not be enough for Open Source company which relies on heavy monetization
erichocean 7y ago
I really like this company, and their developers. Solid tech vision and the actual tech chops to pull it off. I don't like the drama that seems to surround it. This post is just one more vote in the "this company has a lot of drama associated with it", and that to me is always a giant blinking warning sign. Without knowing anything about them (though I do), at this point, I would bet this company flames out eventually, fails to get further funding, and institutes yet another license change to milk the dying cow while the talent flees for greeter pastures. Best case they get acquired by Microsoft, worst case Oracle (I'm sure their users would love that). Or just fade away. Anyway, my $0.02. I hope I'm wrong.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
janemanos 7y ago
Will be interesting to see how other open source projects like ArangoDB (Apache2), Timescale (Apache 2) or Scylla (AGPL/Apache2) will react.
ShakataGaNai 7y ago
Open source is great, open everything is great. But if 99.9% of companies can't make any money on open source because someone big swoops in ... then open source isn't of much use to anyone. It'll drive everyone who tries, out of business or into forced acquisition by said big player. Then people will give up on OSS for anything but hobbies and software they don't care about... and the world as a whole loses out. So... :+1:
NelsonMinar 7y ago
I'm curious about the legal process of relicensing. Did they have significant open source contributors from outsiders? If so, did they have copyright assignment? And if not, then how valuable is it to them to be open source in the first place? (Not trying to cause trouble; I admire Cockroach DB and its founders greatly! But I've watched open source struggle with this kind of thing for 20+ years and am increasingly curious about why businesses choose to open source their core technology.)
- vortico 7y ago
  If community patches are licensed under MIT or BSD, all CockroachDB has to do is include those license texts in their proprietary distribution, which is the only requirement by both licenses. Proprietary derivative works are allowed under MIT and BSD.
  - paxys 7y ago
    It's different in this case, since there isn't a separate proprietary distribution. The entire codebase is being relicensed.
    - vortico 7y ago
      That's not how it works. Each commit is a "derivative work" of the last. If today a codebase is licensed under MIT, tomorrow you can change a single line of code, and this produces a brand new work under US and international copyright law. You can license this work under any license, provided you comply with the MIT license of the work that has been derived.
zinlencer 7y ago
When will CockroachDB release their managed service? Can't find any clear pricing nor a registration form on their website.
- pakshi 7y ago
  (Cockroach Labs employee here) CockroachDB managed service is available today - you can sign up on the website and we'll get in touch with you https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-cockroachdb/ We will release a self-service offering where you can set up a managed cluster without having to talk to us later in the year. Re: pricing, we have different packages based on # of nodes, and size of node (storage, vpcu etc.) and happy to share that in a call.
tracker1 7y ago
The biggest thing that keeps me from even trying CockroachDB is that there's no clear licensing or managed server pricing on the website. It's all a sales funnel. Of course, I don't mind and understand the license change. I just wish they were more upfront about pricing without being subjected to sales.
paxys 7y ago
While I understand the move (similar to what Redis Labs, MongoDB, Confluent and many others have done recently), as one of the many contributors to these projects not affiliated with any company, it feels like a slap in the face. If such licenses gain prominence then having a healthy open source community for large-scale projects will be a thing of the past. As an outsider, it makes zero sense to be involved in the project if my code isn't really going to be open source until 3 years from now, and that can be delayed further or indefinitely if the company wants. IMO the best way forward is for such projects to be run by non-profit foundations, not VC-backed companies.
- Hermitian909 7y ago
  I'm curious about this take. If I'm reading the article correctly it appears if you did not have plans to turn the software into a managed service this has no practical impact on you. Personally, for every open source project I've contributed to if this license has been in place rather than an open source one no one would have been impacted at a practical level (including those doing it professionally). Aside from purely ideological concerns, what about these changes do you think will kill communities?
  - paxys 7y ago
    I think it's a combination of ideological and practical (and in some sense they aren't all that different). If they changed the license once, they can do it again. As a for-profit company they are obligated to their investors and shareholders, and at some point it is inevitable that they will find ways to start charging those who want to self-host as well. The second part of this is that a large number of open source contributions come from employees at large software companies while on company time, and they aren't going to be allowed to do so any longer if the company isn't happy with the licensing terms of the project.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  Hang on. Are you saying that you make a practice of contributing to open source software products of for-profit companies? Those are companies with plenty of VC money to pay you a salary. Why would you give your work to them for free? Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote, but then if I had, why would it bother you that a company like this changed its business model to close an unprofitable loophole?
m0zg 7y ago
TBH, I think _renaming_ CockroachDB would do it more good than relicensing. All other things being equal, I think it is safe to say that nobody wants any cockroaches in their infrastructure. I think it's also safe to say that few people know in detail what CockroachDB is, and its name creates additional friction to more people figuring it out. If you disagree, call your next database project TurdDB or something and see how it does in the marketplace. Names matter. Call it something high-tech sounding and inoffensive. Now that it has some notoriety it no longer needs a controversial name.
meddlepal 7y ago
Smart move and I really hope the BSL can be used by others outside of Cockroach DB either in its current form or as a template for a similar license. This is badly needed in our industry to protect innovators from rent seekers.
gflarity 7y ago
Couple questions: 1) Is CockroachDB actually popular? Like sure they have a couple big users, but is it gaining traction? 2) Would it be as popular as it is if they'd started with this license from the very start?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
Can outside contributors to CockroachDB get a cut of the licensing revenue? I mean, if cockroachlabs is upset that people are taking their open source code and making money without giving them a cut, should they also be upset that they are taking people's open source contributions to that code and not giving them a cut?
forty 7y ago
This is really tough. I really want the redis and cockroachdbs to make money, but on the other hand I don't want to give my customer data to everyone. I give them reluctantly to AWS because, well, I guess at least one company has to have them, and while they are probably not perfect, I reasonably trust them to keep the data safe, but I'd really rather keep this to one. We could run the software on ec2 and pay a licence (we occasionally do that) but when we don't want to maintain things ourselves, we always turn to AWS, which saddens me a lot
- CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
  I just had a look at https://redislabs.com/pricing/ https://redislabs.com/pricing/ If I understand it correctly, you can get Redis Enterprise Cloud, deployed on AWS. So, it's running on AWS, and it looks like they manage it. That sounds to me like they are making an effort to meet your needs, of having it running on AWS (their FAQ mentions making sure that the AWS AZs are in sync), but not maintained by you.
pratio 7y ago
As the link says: The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license I like the idea and would support initiatives like this. If i really want to use CockroachDB then i'll install and maintain it myself on my own instances. In the long run this would also ensure that if i want to move away from AWS to another provider, i am not locked to an AWS service.
grumpydba 7y ago
> The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. This is dishonest and deceptive. One other thing you cannot do is use their code and incorporate it in your open source project. They used to provide an open source parser for postgres' sql syntax. Now it is closed source for 3 years. I don't mind the license change. Lying however is not a good way to behave with customers or open source communities.
throw2016 7y ago
Do bad actors get to hold good actors to the good actors principles? This seems unsustainable and a recipe for disaster, ie tolerating the intolerant whose objective is to gain power and stamp down on dissent and impose their own values. Similarly If you do not believe in open source can you hold anyone else to account by the principles of open source? And if you are committed to open source do bad actors need to be given the same privileges that are extended to everyone else? Do they get to play the 'principle' card that they themselves do not adhere to? Cloud providers are profitable and the work of these app developers arguably has a role in their growth and profits. AWS, GCE and others are solving all their business problems. Why should it be so difficult for them to build a mutually beneficial relationship with open source projects? Or the pipeline of projects they can use breaks down. If they just want to take without adhering to the spirit of open source, then playing the open source card whenever confronted seems too self serving.
antirez 7y ago
Since "Redis" and "Redis Labs" are mentioned multiple times among the comments, here is my gentle reminder that Redis is BSD licensed, and only additional modules provided by Redis Labs have a different license.
ThinkBeat 7y ago
I always hate these discussions. If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee. Here we have people building things on a foundatino of free and open source software, and they feel that they should get paid for the slice that they built, but are they themselves paying every party that was resposible for creating the stack on which they are working? I think usually not. Everyone is quite happy to accept the free work done by others but they miraculously expect to be the person getting paid. Now RedHat took GNU/Linux and figured they ought to get paid for creating a packages, a bit of an eco system around their version and sell support and such. Was that fair? AWS offering some service, are basically doing hosting and support on the product. A lot of people trust AWS/Google/Microsoft to run things in the cloud for them. Nothing is stopping me from creating ThinkBeat Linux and charge for support. Probably I would do very poorly because people now trust RedHat or Linode, AWS to handle issues around Linux for them. I dont think if you create a new database managment system that ou think is great, users will flock from Azure/AWS/GCP/Oracle/IBM to pay you for hosting it for them. You are too small and too risky. Obiouvlsy some people will sign up and if you can earn money you need on that then good.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  "If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee." The problem with these discussions is they always set up this false comparison. Then, what's going on looks hypocritical. Here's what actually happened: 1. Linus et al released Linux with a license that says, "Pay us nothing. Just give back any changes in code you distribute." That's their goal. Those with permissive licenses said "Use it and don't share anything unless you want to." That's their goal per the license agreement. 2. Cockroach Labs started with a goal of making a huge pile of profit on a database whose core they keep as free and OSS as possible. The profit takes priority due to VC funding. That's their goals. Cockroach making profit on Linus et al's work without paying them isn't hypocritical since their license's actual goal was to do that. Whereas, the SaaS vendors are posing a challenge for Cockroach achieving their goals which require making money off their activities. Balancing giving code out as OSS and profit-seeking, they lightly-modified a license that starts as proprietary but goes Apache after 3 years. Personally, I think they're being way, way, too altruistic given what rate of return they're expected to come up with. If anything, people that wrote their dependencies using freeloader-loving licenses are either achieving their goal of commercial uptake or need to pick a license that incentivizes their goals (or just blocks things they hate). If contributors, probably should contribute to software with strongest copyleft available. AGPL and Parity come to mind. Folks using licenses that don't require payment shouldn't expect payment. If folks want payment, then they should sell the software somehow with licenses worded to bring in revenue.

487 points by SEJeff 7y ago

The interesting thing is that, some of AWS products have weird name (hard to remember, strange or new), while it's actually built from OSS.

quotemstr 7y ago

So they're taking their product proprietary. They're not the first to try this move. They won't be the last. It never works. This change guarantees one of two outcomes: 1) CockroachDB becomes irrelevant, as cloud providers stop providing it, or 2) a FOSS implementation of CockroachDB's API (perhaps based on the last FOSS CockroachDB release) becomes dominant.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago
3) The cloud provider forks at the version under the previous license, continues to iterate on it by adding valuable features that are exposed to users, which the OSS version won't have, and now the OSS vendor is playing both marketplace & technical catch-up at the same time and with each reinforcing the downside of the other. Effectively forcing original innovator into the position of being a fast-follower.
- senderista 7y ago
  You mean like what AWS did with Elastic?
  - _msw_ 7y ago
    No. In that case, AWS built and released new Apache licensed, 100% open source extensions for Elasticache to make essential functionality like TLS encryption and authentication available to anyone. It did not fork Elasticsearch, it released a collection of software that works with the OSS core version of Elasticsearch. Disclosure: I work at AWS on EC2, and sometimes provide my opinion on open source topics to other teams.

makapuf 7y ago

Unrelated, but it never occurred to me that cockroachdb and gimp were made by the same persons ! Kudos ! (If I'm not mistaken)

sbuttgereit 7y ago
Over in PostgreSQLand ... Tom Lane is an important member of the PostgreSQL core team and also was involved in the PNG image format (and other graphics related efforts).
- tus87 7y ago
  Yeah well the guy who wrote qemu also did ffmpeg.
jsvcycling 7y ago
Wow you're right, I just looked it up. Very nice!
- tombert 7y ago
  Something that came as a surprise to me was the fact that QEMU and FFMpeg are made by the same guy as well. Kind of depressing; either one of those projects has that person set for life in the job market, and that jerk has both! How am I supposed to compete with that? EDIT: Just a note, I say this with all the love in the world, and certainly wish no ill-will towards Fabrice. I hope my dumb joke above didn't come off as hostile...I think it's pretty cool that one person was able to build two apps that I use daily.
neonate 7y ago
For the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Kimball_(computer_programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Kimball_(computer_prog...

chuckgreenman 7y ago

This is pretty interesting, I'm thinking about how edge cases will be handled. Consider a product like Airtable: at present I think most people would classify it as a consumer productivity tool. Firebase on the other end would be a platform as a service. Airtable is adding features that make it more of a platform as a service. I wonder where the line will be drawn for the new BSL.

penagwin 7y ago
I have a feeling it comes down to how it's exposed, and who is "using" cockroachDB. If Airtable uses cockroachDB then that's fine. The issue is when the cockroachDB is the product that the customer pays for.
bdarnell 7y ago
(Cockroach Labs founder) The details are in the "additional usage grant" clause: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028ce1d81a9b1148f7e9ba2673bf95/licenses/BSL.txt#L8-L16 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028c... We decided to draw the line at whether the end user has direct control over table schemas. If users can specify the schema to be used, it's a database service and needs a license. If you're fitting everything into a generic schema (even if the user can specify things that look like new columns in the UI), it's an application and doesn't need a special license.
- amenod 7y ago
  Genius! Very clear line! I wish you all the luck on this endeavour, I really believe the time has come to move a bit away from strict open-source.
- easel 7y ago
  As a startup founder and CTO who has had to deal with getting (or not getting) such licenses through legal, I really appreciate the clarity of definition here. Typically the language tends to be vague around "derivative works as a service" which conservative lawyers treat as a risk. Well done.
- 7y ago

dhd415 7y ago

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 of their software. If you think that the Cockroach Labs, Redis Labs, Mongos, Elastics, etc., of the world provide a net benefit to the software world, I think you have to contend with the fact that there is going to be fewer such companies in the future if AWS keeps eating their lunch.

fossuser 7y ago
It'd be interesting if there was a way to specifically require AWS, Azure, Google Cloud (or more generally any cloud hosting reseller) to pay if they use the open source software or any derivative of it (or if they create any company which then uses it) for the purposes of reselling it to others. Basically give the open source project a 30% cut if you're going to resell it (or fork and resell it). It might be hard to do now since with AWS since with ES Amazon just forked whatever version was already permissively licensed, but it may be interesting to create a new license to protect against this for new OSS projects.
- nradov 7y ago
  You can put any license on your software that you want, but a license that required revenue sharing wouldn't really count as "open source".
  - alfonsodev 7y ago
    I understand what you mean and totally agree with you, I just feel the need to remind (not to you) the term free software, as many things are open source but not free software [1] [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

jacquesm 7y ago

Maybe a good time to change the name as well? Funny names are cute and all but if you want to gain mainstream acceptance for your database product CockroachDB is not the one I would have picked. Downvoters: if you think names for products do not matter you are mistaken.

ummonk 7y ago
I think it would be a bad name for a consumer product but this isn’t a consumer product. CockroachDB invokes a feeling of resilience which is perfect for marketing to engineers.
ziddoap 7y ago
>CockroachDB is not the one I would have picked. What would you have picked, master namer? What criteria determines what the mainstream will accept? "Mongo" seems like a bit of a funny name to me, but they seem to be doing alright... What makes Mongo okay but Cockroach not? Apple is a cute name. Does it pass your test?
- TheresaBraccio 7y ago
  ^ nice 'Name of the Wind' reference
reificator 7y ago
> Downvoters: if you think names for products do not matter you are mistaken. Disagreeing with your particular opinions on a particular name doesn't imply a belief that names don't matter.
- juped 7y ago
  You shouldn't downvote to disagree!
  - reificator 7y ago
    In fairness I didn't vote on that post, but I was assuming downvotes were for disagreement.

louis-paul 7y ago

Recently discussed with somebody at a major cloud provider and IIRC their response was in essence “I think we’re doing them a favor: ask Neo4j about our release of [hosted graph database service]. We’ve taken a share of their business, but the overall market is much bigger, and they’re doing great. Our hosted products are not even the most polished in the market, and companies like Elastic can easily be compete with us.” Thoughts?

gregwebs 7y ago
Yes, some cloud providers readily suggest competing with them by making something better. In the end, the DB is still running on their infrastructure (required to keep the customer's latency low) and they are still capturing profit even if it is not as much as their DBaaS profit. There is a problem though that a DBaaS provider is still at an inherent disadvantage. You aren't in the AWS/GCP cli tool and APIs. And the DBaaS has to setup VPC peering across accounts, which has some inherit limitations (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP).
- merb 7y ago
  > (e.g. no DNS resolution on GCP) actually you do not need DNS resolution on GCP since you can actually have a high available IP way easier (which is way better). in AWS it's also possible to have a highly available IP, but it's way harder to do so.
maxdemarzi 7y ago
Sure. Amazon Neptune is garbage, but that's not the issue. They are competing fair and square here. The problem is when they fork <insert liberally licensed open source project> completely.
bch 7y ago
Years ago I heard the same from a Postgres-contractor friend who said amazons ready-to-go (now RDS, but iirc, back then just MySQL; I don’t recall the service brand name - maybe also RDS) SQL service was welcome, because it sucked. Its not clear to me though that 1) it would stay “sucky” 2) users would make the distinction my friend did. I’m worried it’d play out where Amazon would vacuum up the “low end” part of the market and the “high end” would further have to be competed for, because Joes Expert RDBMS Service v Amazon.

hartator 7y ago

> The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. How much a SaaS has to do to not be consider as selling CockroachDB as is? These questions apart is worth noting that AWS can still copy CockroachDB APIs, rename it AWS Ants, and called it a day.

ComputerGuru 7y ago
The "API" you are referring to is known as SQL, transmitted over the wire using the pgsql protocol. There's nothing to copy. The magic of Cockroach is in the implementation.
- hartator 7y ago
  Not sure why they changed their license then. Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB?
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    Yes, it is indeed a little puzzling. CrB's biggest benefit is to people not interested in engineering their own scaling/sharing solutions for existing RDBMS options or if they care about optimal resource utilization (under a certain subset of conditions), neither of which are particularly draws for the AWS team. Perhaps they are more worried about other vendors.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Doesn't AWS have already a Postgres-like database with RDS but also with DynamoDB? They have actual managed Postgres with RDS for Postgres, and also a Postgres-compatible (SQL dialect and wire protocol) version of RDS Aurora.
gtirloni 7y ago
That's what makes this even more puzzling. Is there demand for CRDB-flavored SQL features?

haney 7y ago

I wasn't able to find a link to the new license in the blog post but it is in their github repo for anyone interested https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/licenses/BSL.txt https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/license...

makkesk8 7y ago

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, great product.

napsterbr 7y ago
Never used CRDB so this question may make no sense, but given it builds upon Postgres (AFAIU), couldn't you use any of the many backup solutions Pg offers?
- jsty 7y ago
  It uses the Postgres wire protocol, but isn't based on Postgres under the hood
- ansible 7y ago
  CRDB is compatible with the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so you can use existing database drivers (in C#, Golang, whatever) to talk to a CRDB instance. The SQL itself is slightly different (no two databases are the same these days), so that would have to be adjusted. If your backup solution is fine with "SELECT * FROM table1; SELECT * FROM table2; ..." you can use the client interface for backups. But usually you want to a snapshot of the entire database at some (self-consistent!) point in time, and back up that.
  - napsterbr 7y ago
    This makes more sense, thanks. I just realized I mistook cockroachdb for timescaledb.
  - olavgg 7y ago
    Would ZFS snapshots work? It is what I use to backup PostgreSQL, much easier and faster than ordinary backup

iblaine 7y ago

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.

DVassallo 7y ago
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.
- vageli 7y ago
  > 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. Most open source projects are not given to the public domain, but encumbered with clauses in the form of their license.
  - DVassallo 7y ago
    Permissive licenses are basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity.
  - paxys 7y ago
    And none of the companies are breaching the license.
- iblaine 7y ago
  Quicksort is an algorithm, a copyright on it would not hold up, but a creative use of it may hold up. Kafka is not part of the public domain, but available through an open source license, that AWS is arguably exploiting to make some money off the back of open source contributors.
  - DVassallo 7y ago
    True, but for all intents and purposes, it's basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity: "Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form." https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE#L67-L72 https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE#L67-L72

docapotamus 7y ago

Well played cockroachlabs. I find it awkward being an AWS user and knowing there products are something else under the hud, even when they do use the product name. It leads to user lock in, which is what they want. These addendum to licenses are what the world needs. Not sure it would work for certain products, like BSDs though, although they seem to get a lot more back from those who use them in products (Netflix is a good example)

JoshTriplett 7y ago

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

api 7y ago
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.
- jasonlotito 7y ago
  No, the open source community is not about giving free labor to Amazon. But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about members of the open source community taking free labor from the community and then pulling back on the open source promise. As someone in the same boat, I'd hate to see a project I contributed to change it's license to something that limits how the applications can be used. If something is licensed as MIT, I expect it to stay MIT. Furthermore, the presumption that users of the software are now required to contribute back flies in the face of the agreement. I'm not against people using a license like this. It does however seems a slap in the face to change the license after benefiting from the fact that you are releasing an open source product. tl;dr: It's a bait and switch, and dislike it.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    It also pulls the rug out from under other projects depending on them.
    - amenod 7y ago
      Not really. The limit is clearly defined (if you are using it as DB, there is no change). If you allow users to create schemas, then it's a different thing, but I'm guessing there is no such project.
  - 7y ago

DVassallo 7y ago

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 now it will likely be an Aurora feature. If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do.

api 7y ago
> If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do. ... run it somewhere other than Amazon?
- DVassallo 7y ago
  lol. True, but not much to differentiate on that unfortunately, unless they're able to point out something fundamentally wrong with the Amazon platform.
  - api 7y ago
    Cost? Single point of failure? Data residency laws? Lock in? Just saying there's definitely a market for a database I can run.
    - DVassallo 7y ago
      Yes I agree. They just need to find a good business model for self-hosting though.
lacker 7y ago
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.

xwdv 7y ago

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.

dhuramas 7y ago
Does that mean we shouldn't revisit our decisions and all your decisions should be set in stone? CockroachDB tried something. It seems to not be working- so they are changing. It's not as if they are doing it retroactively.
- paxys 7y ago
  Does everyone who has contributed to this project over the years have a say in this decision? My code itself will also be relicensed, whether I like it or not.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    You actually have the right to appeal that decision, because you own your contributed code. (unless you already agreed in advance through a Contributor License Agreementt.)
- verisimilitudes 7y ago
  >It's not as if they are doing it retroactively. You can't do this retroactively.
TAForObvReasons 7y ago
The outrage is mostly driven by companies that took millions in VC money. VC-fueled open source would always need to find a way to monetize, and "bait and switch" by changing licenses is a tried and true strategy.

tus87 7y ago

> or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service Great so I will write a little shim that loads libcockroach and call it TermiteDB and I'm set.

otterley 7y ago
Intent matters in the law, and judges see right through transparent attempts to evade the spirit of agreements on a frequent basis. They aren't stupid.

didibus 7y ago

I'm all for businesses coming up with whatever licensing terms they want. That said, as a user, it'll be a harder sell if I can't easily understand or validate what the license permits and doesn't. For example, with their new license, could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? Or what if I'm not offering cockroachDB as a service directly, but the service I'm building and offering as a service can still be argued to be some sort of data-store?

amenod 7y ago
The way I understand it, the whole idea of this relicensing is that you can no longer take someone else's work and build your business competing with them. So no, you can't do that. Seems fair enough to me.
- didibus 7y ago
  Right, but now there's this ambiguity about what counts as competing. And that ambiguity sounds like a risk to business, which opens a door to potential liabilities if CockroachLabs were ever to believe you are competing. That in turn makes CockroachDB a harder sell to management.
  - amenod 7y ago
    True. Though in this case it's very admirable how cleanly they have specified the exception case. But yes, it is a harder sell, and this is the main issue that these licenses must solve if they want to be successful.
toyg 7y ago
> could I fork cockroachDB, rebrand it, add considerable improvements of my own, and then offer that as a service? If you were to do that, even with current licenses, you probably couldn't call it CockroachDB anyway.
- didibus 7y ago

amenod 7y ago

Hm, wasn't one of the conditions to use BSL (the name of the license) that one of the "Change licenses" must be GPL? I remember distinctly because while I liked BSL, I never understood why I couldn't use AGPL as fallback (which would be much better suited to my use case). EDIT: It seems I was wrong: > To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or any later version, or a license that is compatible with GPL Version 2.0 or a later version, where “compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version. Licensor may specify additional Change Licenses without limitation. https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ So Apache is OK, because such software can be incorporated into GPL app. AGPL is not, because it places additional restrictions.

didibus 7y ago

Could someone say just take a normal open source license, like MIT, and just add a provision saying, if you are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, this license doesn't apply to you and you are not permitted to use the code in any way? Basically, just blacklist certain companies that compete with you directly.

amenod 7y ago
It's still not free/open/libre source anymore, because you are discriminating against someone, so it's not in-line with the set of freedoms as defined by both OSI and FSF. Whether this matters to you or not is another question, of course... :)
- didibus 7y ago
  Hum, I feel there's some ambiguity there. Like FSF says from here https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html: > A free program must offer the four freedoms to any user that obtains a copy of the software, provided the user has complied thus far with the conditions of the free license covering the software. It's unclear what "obtains a copy" means. You could make it that certain companies are not allowed to "obtain a copy", and thus if they do, it is through illegitimate means. For example, it goes to length to say Free software does not mean gratis. So I'd suspect it would claim that if software is sold, and you pirate the copy instead of paying for it, you have broken the conditions of the free license. But if you paid, and a copy is delivered to you, from that point on, the four set of freedoms are granted to you over the copy that was given. So, I can see something where, it is gratis, but obtaining the copy is not granted to everyone, but only to some, depending on if you're a potential competitor or not. And that seems like it could still fall under that definition of Free Software.
  - amenod 7y ago
    Sure - except that under their definition of freedoms you are allowed to share software with anyone, so while you can sell it to the first person, they can freely share it with anyone. But truly, I don't think looking for holes in definition of freedom would help anyone. The question if, do these definitions achieve what we have set out to do, and in what way? If yes, great. If not, maybe the time has come to define another set of freedoms, which still protect users better than closed source, but allow developers and maintainers to make money from their creations. And yes, they will not be open source, so we might as well come up with a different term.

k__ 7y ago

I had the impression cloud providers like AWS would move to using their own core services to emulate other systems and not host the original thing.

sangnoir 7y ago
They already have - Amazon has Aurora, which has MySQL and Postgres compatibility. I'm sure if there's enough demand, Amazon will add CockroadDB compatibility to Aurora in the not-too-distant future.
- mixedCase 7y ago
  > Amazon has Aurora, which has MySQL and Postgres compatibility Which lags behind upstream in versioning and has its own quirks. Or Redshift, which is still stuck in Postgres 8 and absolutely has its own quirks.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    > Which lags behind upstream in versioning and has its own quirks. No doubt re-implentation will lag and will not be perfect (either buggy, or not buggy enough to match reference). The big question: is it AWS users shopping for DBs, or MySQL/Postgres/CockroachDB users shopping for *aaS services? I suspect the former outnumber the latter, and they will likely tolerate being behind the bleeding edge.
    - mixedCase 7y ago
      I think it's still the majority of developers that first deal with databases outside a cloud environment and then want a managed version of it in their environment (which btw, Amazon does offer in RDS Postgres/MySQl, but it's their forks that have these problems). And being behind the bleeding edge is problematic at least these days that databases are incorporating great features, but the bigger problem is incompatibility and subtle differences. Those are the truly annoying issues.
StreamBright 7y ago

gtirloni 7y ago

CockroachDB is an excellent project but it doesn't have the massive adoption that would prompt AWS/Azure/GCP to implement it as a managed service. Companies are much more likely to just go with AWS Aurora than to consider CockroachDB at this point. I'm still amazed as how promising open source projects continue to undermine themselves with this "commons clause" movement. I hope something good comes out of it but I'm pessimistic.

staticassertion 7y ago
Why would this undermine their efforts? It seems totally reasonable to say "You can't just sell a hosted version of this yourself". Anyone who was planning to use Cockroach still can, it even seems that you could be a CockroachDB shop that provides consulting services, so long as you don't manage and host it.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc). For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.
  - filereaper 7y ago
    >Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs. I don't think this is the case, a third party can provide hosted CockroachDB provided they license it from Cockroach Labs. >"The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license." Again, IANAL.
    - gtirloni 7y ago
      Good point. We shall wait and see how that turns out. Right now their sales chat can't say how much that would cost. It seem an alternative could be to provide something like a cPanel-like thing that would enable other companies to easily offer CockroachDB DBaaS solutions. That's adding value rather than subtracting.

gtirloni 7y ago

If you have this page open, please beware of your battery. It's currently consuming 200% CPU whenever it has focus.

PetahNZ 7y ago
Works fine for me.

archit3cture 7y ago

It is nice to see that CockroachDB's team keep their original vision of creating a long term open source "commons" of their database. What I don't totally understand when I take my developer's hat is why the split between "enterprise" features under CCL and core features under APL/BSL is kept. Without the "enterprise" features, CRDB does not feel like beeing totally open source and open source users are sort of second-zone users. Are open-source fans supposed to write clean-room implementations of the features (would it even make sense in the licencing model CRDB uses) ? It would also be nice to have a licencing clause where a change of ownership of CockRoach Labs or the bailout of the company would trigger a licence change for the enterprise features (maybe even after N years). But as I said congrats on the product and all the best in your commercial endeavour ! may this licence change open new cloud opportunities !

buckminster 7y ago

So BSL now means "Boost Software License" and "Business Source License". That's not confusing.

bithavoc 7y ago

Good for CockroachDB, they need to make money. I understand I'm not their target user though, I stopped using them when they released Follower-Reads as an enterprise feature. I'm back to Postgres for now but I can't stop thinking about the opportunity CRDB is missing by not releasing the enterprise features as part of the BSL-licensed core, that way I can use them from the very beginning(when I have no money) and when I grow and have traction, money and what not, then I can pay to scale beyond X amount of nodes/capacity a la MemSQL[0]. [0] https://www.memsql.com/blog/announcing-memsql-free-tier/ https://www.memsql.com/blog/announcing-memsql-free-tier/

espadrine 7y ago
> I stopped using them when they released Follower-Reads as an enterprise feature. I read Cockroach Labs’ strategy to be good on single nodes, great on single-datacentre cluster, phenomenal worldwide. They offer single-DC features open-source, and worldwide enterprise-only. Apart from SQL features, their open-source cluster offer seems superior to PostgreSQL. Sure, they do not have follower-reads, but neither does PG (which does not even have AS OF SYSTEM TIME, a prerequisite), and it is only beneficial with multi-DC. Reads are still distributed by range, so there is no particular negative compared to Postgres. Why was Follower-Reads a dealbreaker?
- bithavoc 7y ago
  I'm not necessarily exhausting the physical capacity of a single datacenter to expand to another datacenter, I may expand early or from day one to run queries closer to the user even if the workload is a few seconds behind. I don't think Follow-the-workload works well for that scenario.

zem 7y ago

this seems like an excellent licence, clearly spelling out the intent of the copyright, rather than trying to fashion a one-size-fits-all set of rules. it reminds me of cory doctorow's point that, intuitively, if some community theatre wanted to dramatise one of his works, they should be able to just do so, but if a major hollywood studio wanted to film it they should require a licence, and it is hard to draft a copyright law that does this properly.

stingraycharles 7y ago

It’s interesting to see the mindset over here at HN change over the year. I recall when MongoDB introduced their “commons clause”, RedisLabs did the relicensing and ElasticSearch doing the dual license open source code, there was quite some outrage over here. I guess everyone is accepting that these clouds are in fact major threats to these projects, as providing these databases as a service is pretty much the only realistic way to get decent revenue numbers. I think it’s good that CockroachDB is preemptively doing this, now that it has become more acceptable a practice.

gtirloni 7y ago
Discussion fatigue is a thing.
- kodablah 7y ago
  Agreed. I disagree with the change and have made my comments in the other situations about taking the good with the bad when you give something away. Just no need to keep harping on it, doesn't mean mindset has shifted.
skybrian 7y ago
Part of it is that companies are getting better at it. There is no attempt at confusion over what "open source" means in this announcement, and automatically converting to open source in three years is clever. I don't see anything to object to, do you?
- mritchie712 7y ago
  GCP just started offering Postgres v11 in beta in April and it was released on 2018-10-18. They skipped v10 (released October 5, 2017). Comparing to Postgres, three years feels like the right balance (i.e. in the zone a cloud provider would want to offer it).
BillinghamJ 7y ago
Imo the key difference here is that they're owning the decision and not trying to paper over the fact that it is no longer OSI Open Source. The three year change is also a big deal in my mind. Would make me a lot more comfortable to adopt knowing it is absolutely guaranteed to become OSI Open Source later.

galaxyLogic 7y ago

Mongo is doing great for an OS product. Wonder if CRDB is trying to take a lesson from their playbook. https://www.google.com/search?q=mongo+db+capitalization&oq=mongo+db+capitalization&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.6033j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=mongo+db+capitalization&oq=m...

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I wish them well but fear this won't work out for them. This sounds like a smart move until you realize that they are just one of many players in a crowded market and that this actually decreases their value proposition for end users and external contributors. Having less of both is bad news for an OSS project, no matter how you spin it. The way I see it this type of company has a short term value that derives from them being first (more or less) to market with whatever it is they do well. In this case, their thing is having a sharded/clustered db that can replicate across datacenters and with serialized transactions. Awesome, that's a great thing to have and it will take other databases a while to get there. But they will eventually and that matters. This stuff commoditizes quite rapidly. It's based on published research by Google half a decade ago and people can look at the source code and algorithms. It's just a matter of time before somebody else figures out how to replicate what they do in some other product. Somebody like e.g. the postgresql developers: https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/07/postgresql-concurrency-isolation-and-locking/ https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/07/postgresql-concurrency-isol... and https://pgdash.io/blog/postgres-11-sharding.html https://pgdash.io/blog/postgres-11-sharding.html. It's probably not perfect yet but they are obviously heading the same direction and there's a notion of good enough and diminishing returns. When it does catch up, it all reverts to which is the best product in the market. Part of that is features but another part of that is a robust developer community and having access to robust support and hosting options from multiple companies. A failing VC backed company that controls the code base and treats it like a walled garden means that community is only as good as that single company behind it, i.e. not very good. It simultaneously repels potential users and contributors thus slowing down adoption and development speed while increasing the R&D burden for the single backing company to not fall behind any further. They can't win that game. In a nutshell, postgresql does not have that problem and it never will. Mysql doesn't have that problem either. Both developer ecosystems consist of collaborating frenemies that work together because it is better than not doing so. Both provide pretty good database solutions with plenty of hosted solutions (including Amazon and other cloud providers), commercial support via several companies, etc. Also both are pretty much guaranteed to continue to have active development for as long as there are people willing to sell their time doing that and there are so many companies using both that there is just no way that that would change within the next few decades or most likely this century. Essentially all of the current companies behind both could go bankrupt and all that would do is create an opportunity for new companies to step in and take over.

PeterZaitsev 7y ago

CockroachDB has raised over $50M of Venture capital which obviously pushes them on the "grow revenue fast" track, which is much easier if you do not have competition from the cloud vendors. I think there is so much black and white positioning of this issue - competition from AWS does not eliminate revenue for the project, but reduces it, by a lot. It may not be enough for Open Source company which relies on heavy monetization

erichocean 7y ago

I really like this company, and their developers. Solid tech vision and the actual tech chops to pull it off. I don't like the drama that seems to surround it. This post is just one more vote in the "this company has a lot of drama associated with it", and that to me is always a giant blinking warning sign. Without knowing anything about them (though I do), at this point, I would bet this company flames out eventually, fails to get further funding, and institutes yet another license change to milk the dying cow while the talent flees for greeter pastures. Best case they get acquired by Microsoft, worst case Oracle (I'm sure their users would love that). Or just fade away. Anyway, my $0.02. I hope I'm wrong.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

janemanos 7y ago

Will be interesting to see how other open source projects like ArangoDB (Apache2), Timescale (Apache 2) or Scylla (AGPL/Apache2) will react.

ShakataGaNai 7y ago

Open source is great, open everything is great. But if 99.9% of companies can't make any money on open source because someone big swoops in ... then open source isn't of much use to anyone. It'll drive everyone who tries, out of business or into forced acquisition by said big player. Then people will give up on OSS for anything but hobbies and software they don't care about... and the world as a whole loses out. So... :+1:

NelsonMinar 7y ago

I'm curious about the legal process of relicensing. Did they have significant open source contributors from outsiders? If so, did they have copyright assignment? And if not, then how valuable is it to them to be open source in the first place? (Not trying to cause trouble; I admire Cockroach DB and its founders greatly! But I've watched open source struggle with this kind of thing for 20+ years and am increasingly curious about why businesses choose to open source their core technology.)

vortico 7y ago
If community patches are licensed under MIT or BSD, all CockroachDB has to do is include those license texts in their proprietary distribution, which is the only requirement by both licenses. Proprietary derivative works are allowed under MIT and BSD.
- paxys 7y ago
  It's different in this case, since there isn't a separate proprietary distribution. The entire codebase is being relicensed.
  - vortico 7y ago
    That's not how it works. Each commit is a "derivative work" of the last. If today a codebase is licensed under MIT, tomorrow you can change a single line of code, and this produces a brand new work under US and international copyright law. You can license this work under any license, provided you comply with the MIT license of the work that has been derived.

zinlencer 7y ago

When will CockroachDB release their managed service? Can't find any clear pricing nor a registration form on their website.

pakshi 7y ago
(Cockroach Labs employee here) CockroachDB managed service is available today - you can sign up on the website and we'll get in touch with you https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/get-cockroachdb/ We will release a self-service offering where you can set up a managed cluster without having to talk to us later in the year. Re: pricing, we have different packages based on # of nodes, and size of node (storage, vpcu etc.) and happy to share that in a call.

tracker1 7y ago

The biggest thing that keeps me from even trying CockroachDB is that there's no clear licensing or managed server pricing on the website. It's all a sales funnel. Of course, I don't mind and understand the license change. I just wish they were more upfront about pricing without being subjected to sales.

paxys 7y ago

While I understand the move (similar to what Redis Labs, MongoDB, Confluent and many others have done recently), as one of the many contributors to these projects not affiliated with any company, it feels like a slap in the face. If such licenses gain prominence then having a healthy open source community for large-scale projects will be a thing of the past. As an outsider, it makes zero sense to be involved in the project if my code isn't really going to be open source until 3 years from now, and that can be delayed further or indefinitely if the company wants. IMO the best way forward is for such projects to be run by non-profit foundations, not VC-backed companies.

Hermitian909 7y ago
I'm curious about this take. If I'm reading the article correctly it appears if you did not have plans to turn the software into a managed service this has no practical impact on you. Personally, for every open source project I've contributed to if this license has been in place rather than an open source one no one would have been impacted at a practical level (including those doing it professionally). Aside from purely ideological concerns, what about these changes do you think will kill communities?
- paxys 7y ago
  I think it's a combination of ideological and practical (and in some sense they aren't all that different). If they changed the license once, they can do it again. As a for-profit company they are obligated to their investors and shareholders, and at some point it is inevitable that they will find ways to start charging those who want to self-host as well. The second part of this is that a large number of open source contributions come from employees at large software companies while on company time, and they aren't going to be allowed to do so any longer if the company isn't happy with the licensing terms of the project.
jasonkester 7y ago
Hang on. Are you saying that you make a practice of contributing to open source software products of for-profit companies? Those are companies with plenty of VC money to pay you a salary. Why would you give your work to them for free? Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote, but then if I had, why would it bother you that a company like this changed its business model to close an unprofitable loophole?

m0zg 7y ago

TBH, I think _renaming_ CockroachDB would do it more good than relicensing. All other things being equal, I think it is safe to say that nobody wants any cockroaches in their infrastructure. I think it's also safe to say that few people know in detail what CockroachDB is, and its name creates additional friction to more people figuring it out. If you disagree, call your next database project TurdDB or something and see how it does in the marketplace. Names matter. Call it something high-tech sounding and inoffensive. Now that it has some notoriety it no longer needs a controversial name.

meddlepal 7y ago

Smart move and I really hope the BSL can be used by others outside of Cockroach DB either in its current form or as a template for a similar license. This is badly needed in our industry to protect innovators from rent seekers.

gflarity 7y ago

Couple questions: 1) Is CockroachDB actually popular? Like sure they have a couple big users, but is it gaining traction? 2) Would it be as popular as it is if they'd started with this license from the very start?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

Can outside contributors to CockroachDB get a cut of the licensing revenue? I mean, if cockroachlabs is upset that people are taking their open source code and making money without giving them a cut, should they also be upset that they are taking people's open source contributions to that code and not giving them a cut?

forty 7y ago

This is really tough. I really want the redis and cockroachdbs to make money, but on the other hand I don't want to give my customer data to everyone. I give them reluctantly to AWS because, well, I guess at least one company has to have them, and while they are probably not perfect, I reasonably trust them to keep the data safe, but I'd really rather keep this to one. We could run the software on ec2 and pay a licence (we occasionally do that) but when we don't want to maintain things ourselves, we always turn to AWS, which saddens me a lot

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
I just had a look at https://redislabs.com/pricing/ https://redislabs.com/pricing/ If I understand it correctly, you can get Redis Enterprise Cloud, deployed on AWS. So, it's running on AWS, and it looks like they manage it. That sounds to me like they are making an effort to meet your needs, of having it running on AWS (their FAQ mentions making sure that the AWS AZs are in sync), but not maintained by you.

pratio 7y ago

As the link says: The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license I like the idea and would support initiatives like this. If i really want to use CockroachDB then i'll install and maintain it myself on my own instances. In the long run this would also ensure that if i want to move away from AWS to another provider, i am not locked to an AWS service.

grumpydba 7y ago

> The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. This is dishonest and deceptive. One other thing you cannot do is use their code and incorporate it in your open source project. They used to provide an open source parser for postgres' sql syntax. Now it is closed source for 3 years. I don't mind the license change. Lying however is not a good way to behave with customers or open source communities.

throw2016 7y ago

Do bad actors get to hold good actors to the good actors principles? This seems unsustainable and a recipe for disaster, ie tolerating the intolerant whose objective is to gain power and stamp down on dissent and impose their own values. Similarly If you do not believe in open source can you hold anyone else to account by the principles of open source? And if you are committed to open source do bad actors need to be given the same privileges that are extended to everyone else? Do they get to play the 'principle' card that they themselves do not adhere to? Cloud providers are profitable and the work of these app developers arguably has a role in their growth and profits. AWS, GCE and others are solving all their business problems. Why should it be so difficult for them to build a mutually beneficial relationship with open source projects? Or the pipeline of projects they can use breaks down. If they just want to take without adhering to the spirit of open source, then playing the open source card whenever confronted seems too self serving.

antirez 7y ago

Since "Redis" and "Redis Labs" are mentioned multiple times among the comments, here is my gentle reminder that Redis is BSD licensed, and only additional modules provided by Redis Labs have a different license.

ThinkBeat 7y ago

I always hate these discussions. If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee. Here we have people building things on a foundatino of free and open source software, and they feel that they should get paid for the slice that they built, but are they themselves paying every party that was resposible for creating the stack on which they are working? I think usually not. Everyone is quite happy to accept the free work done by others but they miraculously expect to be the person getting paid. Now RedHat took GNU/Linux and figured they ought to get paid for creating a packages, a bit of an eco system around their version and sell support and such. Was that fair? AWS offering some service, are basically doing hosting and support on the product. A lot of people trust AWS/Google/Microsoft to run things in the cloud for them. Nothing is stopping me from creating ThinkBeat Linux and charge for support. Probably I would do very poorly because people now trust RedHat or Linode, AWS to handle issues around Linux for them. I dont think if you create a new database managment system that ou think is great, users will flock from Azure/AWS/GCP/Oracle/IBM to pay you for hosting it for them. You are too small and too risky. Obiouvlsy some people will sign up and if you can earn money you need on that then good.

nickpsecurity 7y ago
"If you want to get paid, then create proprietary software and sell it, if you can. Nothing wrong with doig it. But if you are developing something you call open source software and you use GNU/Linux for it, then how much money should GNU and Linus get for you doing that? You could go with Windows insteand and pay the licensing fee." The problem with these discussions is they always set up this false comparison. Then, what's going on looks hypocritical. Here's what actually happened: 1. Linus et al released Linux with a license that says, "Pay us nothing. Just give back any changes in code you distribute." That's their goal. Those with permissive licenses said "Use it and don't share anything unless you want to." That's their goal per the license agreement. 2. Cockroach Labs started with a goal of making a huge pile of profit on a database whose core they keep as free and OSS as possible. The profit takes priority due to VC funding. That's their goals. Cockroach making profit on Linus et al's work without paying them isn't hypocritical since their license's actual goal was to do that. Whereas, the SaaS vendors are posing a challenge for Cockroach achieving their goals which require making money off their activities. Balancing giving code out as OSS and profit-seeking, they lightly-modified a license that starts as proprietary but goes Apache after 3 years. Personally, I think they're being way, way, too altruistic given what rate of return they're expected to come up with. If anything, people that wrote their dependencies using freeloader-loving licenses are either achieving their goal of commercial uptake or need to pick a license that incentivizes their goals (or just blocks things they hate). If contributors, probably should contribute to software with strongest copyleft available. AGPL and Parity come to mind. Folks using licenses that don't require payment shouldn't expect payment. If folks want payment, then they should sell the software somehow with licenses worded to bring in revenue.