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The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example

The problem with this argument is that there has always been a before and after. IE This is not the first business model issue OSS has dealt with. For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. (And this was even a similar kind of disintermediation applied to authors as you see now - people only cared what they got from redhat, not from the original author) One interesting constant is that most of the projects that felt a need to change licensing to react to business model issues over the years are dead ;) . Not all of them, mind you. But the failure rate seems really really high. The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. No license change will fix that. In that case, AWS actually controls your customer more than you do. Unless something comes along that is "better enough" that people are willing to buck AWS to use it, this approach of relicensing fails. (and the customers certainly don't care about your licensing scheme)

OJFord 7y ago
> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. > No license change will fix that. Well, perhaps not a licence change, but if it's good enough that it's The One the provider wants, but it can't offer it under the terms of the licence, then paying for it under a separate licence could be a win for both parties.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward. Maintaining API/wire-protocol compatibility isn't that hard for large tech companies these licenses are trying to battle. I don't think these open source companies are not aware of the risk of forking, but they are between a rock (AWS/GCP) and a hard place (VC returns demands).
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    > Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward e.g. AWS creating OpenDistro for Elasticsearch and adding core elastic stack functionality for free (Auth/TLS/Alerting) by integrating and adapting existing OS components.
j88439h84 7y ago
Is there a way to encourage AWS/GCP to contract major project maintainers for support? For example, could GCP set up a platform where maintainers of Postgres, Redis, ..., could sign up to be paid monthly, and perhaps to prioritize GCP issues when doing maintenance? This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these popular tools.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  Cockroach Labs took $53M in VC: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs For the scale of the required exit, they would need a very large support contract, and at that point it would be easier for Google / Amazon to just build their own solution, hire their own people to provide support and development, or just let market forces do their thing. The fundamental shift now is that a lot of open source software is on shaky ground, having been built by VC money searching a profit. This is the same force plaguing NPM and the JS community. The piper must be paid at any cost, even if it means compromising the open source part of the project
  - jeena 7y ago
    I agree with that and it is one of the main reasons why I personally don't care for Open Source and make a huge distinction between it and Free Software.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      Free software has the exact same problem here. You can be 100% free software and still have VC funding you. For the context of this discussion, they're the same.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      There is essentially no difference between Open Source and Free Software, though people who prefer one label over the other tend to have different ideologies. In practice essentially everything that is recognized as Free Software by the FSF and the broader Free Software community is likewise recognized as Open Source by OSI and the broader Open Source community, and vice versa.
mcphage 7y ago
> One interesting constant is that most of the projects that felt a need to change licensing to react to business model issues over the years are dead ;) . Not all of them, mind you. But the failure rate seems really really high. The failure rate for all projects is pretty high, though.
- michaelt 7y ago
  That, and if it was going well they wouldn't have relicensed. Just like parachutists who open their reserve chute suffer more injuries than ones who don't :)
karlding 7y ago
> For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. Something similar was discussed a few weeks ago with respect to procps [0] and the struggles of maintaining Open Source projects. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936320
kemitchell 7y ago
Many authors are still squeezed out on support. RedHat is the breakaway winner there.
btown 7y ago
> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. No license change will fix that. That's a really extreme way to think about this. Consider this example: I lose 1 Utility Point for every new provider I need to contract with, set up monitoring for, set up billing etc. This balloons to losing 2 UP if that provider's in a different public cloud, but since many let you choose an AWS region, this is probably not a problem. I gain 5 UP from using Cockroach, because it saves me engineering time. And I gain 1 additional UP from using latest Cockroach because they're making real optimization breakthroughs. So pre-license-change, AWS Cockroach that tracks the latest release might net 6 UP, and Cockroach Cloud run by the company might only net 5 UP because of that cost of a new provider. But post-license change, Cockroach Cloud would be tied, because now I'm comparing the cost of a new provider against the cost of latest developments. And every single blog post I see about Cockroach developments pushes me in that direction. It's a really great move, though kind of a loss to open source. I wish the Cockroach folks the best.
- DannyBee 7y ago
  "That's a really extreme way to think about this." I would argue this is probably how most CTO's think about it unless forced at gunpoint to do otherwise.
- kelnos 7y ago
  There's another angle to it post-license-change: AWS Cockroach continues tracking the latest release and pays a licensing fee for the privilege of doing so. Your costs to use it might go up a tiny amount, but AWS would likely eat most of it, and, bonus: CockroachDB's development gets more funding. It's hard to put a price tag on knowing that an open source project your business depends on is well-funded enough that it's unlikely to disappear or be difficult to support.
matthewaveryusa 7y ago
You're completely missing the point. The point isn't to stop AWS from integrating. The point is to get a slice of the pie if AWS does decide to do an integration because now, with the new license, AWS needs to come to them first and ask for a license, which I'm sure they would give with reasonable terms.
- bonzini 7y ago
  What is less sure is that AWS would come and ask for a license, instead of cooking their own to get customers more locked-in to their platform.
- yarrel 7y ago
  This fantasy of getting the VCs their money from Amazon rather than non-existent customers is not going to play out as they want. If we assume Amazon are evil, they won't hand over a slice of the pie they'll just write a replacement. So no integration, no money, and no users. But at least it's not the fault of "Open Source" I guess.
  - lmeyerov 7y ago
    Yep. The warning shot was GCP for these startups, not AWS.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  Indeed. If AWS makes a load of money out of Cockroach's hard work, why shouldn't Cockroach get a slice of it?
  - growse 7y ago
    > Indeed. If AWS makes a load of money out of Cockroach's hard work, why shouldn't Cockroach get a slice of it? They should have thought about that before benefitting from it being open source.
    - cabalamat 7y ago
manigandham 7y ago
Exactly, customers want services that solve problems, not software that they have to operate. Clients rarely care what backend is actually running, which is why the clouds can offer the same APIs like Postgres and MongoDB backed by their own custom software.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kelnos 7y ago
> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. And Amazon/Google/etc. still really wants to offer hosted CockroachDB, they can purchase a license, which helps fund development, and would probably be a financial rounding error to an outfit like AWS. > Unless something comes along that is "better enough" that people are willing to buck AWS to use it, this approach of relicensing fails. > (and the customers certainly don't care about your licensing scheme) I think you're misinterpreting how this license works and what it actually restricts, or you've overestimated the number of users this will affect. Most customers don't have to care; for the common use ("I want to install CockroachDB on AWS/GCP/my own server and use it as a data store for my product"), the licensing change is immaterial and they can use the software in the same way as they could when it was Apache-licensed. The only way this backfires is if Amazon creates a clean-room CockroachDB workalike and offers it as a hosted service. Even then, it's not a slam dunk: for example, I'd very much prefer to run redis myself on bare EC2 instances than use AWS ElastiCache, as the latter just generally doesn't meet my availability requirements. I've also once migrated a service from redis to DynamoDB and had a terrible experience during and after, so switching to a theoretical workalike isn't without its costs and risks.
- freeone3000 7y ago
  > There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. There is. This is no longer an OSI license, which means it's no longer on the automatic whitelist. Using CockroachDB now requires running through legal, which really makes me reconsider just using the hosted whatever offering, despite the issues.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    that's kind of a "for now" issue. eventually these will become common enough that things will shake out, but it will take years.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
I mean what the heck are they going to do when one of these tech giants pulls a Oracle and buys the whole project out? I'd much rather see Microsoft have taken MySQL over than Oracle. It's sad that I trust Microsoft with OSS projects more than I would most tech giants, well not sad because it's Microsoft, but sad because somebody like Google used to be seen as a good tech giant that worked on OSS, but then they extended and extinguished (Android, Chrome, Email, AMP so on).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  To realize why licenses like GPL exist, instead of pushing for non-copyleft licenses. We are slowly getting back to the shareware and PD days, specially since many kinds of FOSS applications are hard to monetize, e.g. desktop apps.

OJFord 7y ago

> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. > No license change will fix that. Well, perhaps not a licence change, but if it's good enough that it's The One the provider wants, but it can't offer it under the terms of the licence, then paying for it under a separate licence could be a win for both parties.

sangnoir 7y ago
Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward. Maintaining API/wire-protocol compatibility isn't that hard for large tech companies these licenses are trying to battle. I don't think these open source companies are not aware of the risk of forking, but they are between a rock (AWS/GCP) and a hard place (VC returns demands).
- Xylakant 7y ago
  > Depending on the licensing cost and the effort required to integrate the project with their infrastructure, it might be cheaper for the provider to fork the last version before the relicense and support it going forward e.g. AWS creating OpenDistro for Elasticsearch and adding core elastic stack functionality for free (Auth/TLS/Alerting) by integrating and adapting existing OS components.

j88439h84 7y ago

Is there a way to encourage AWS/GCP to contract major project maintainers for support? For example, could GCP set up a platform where maintainers of Postgres, Redis, ..., could sign up to be paid monthly, and perhaps to prioritize GCP issues when doing maintenance? This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these popular tools.

TAForObvReasons 7y ago
Cockroach Labs took $53M in VC: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs For the scale of the required exit, they would need a very large support contract, and at that point it would be easier for Google / Amazon to just build their own solution, hire their own people to provide support and development, or just let market forces do their thing. The fundamental shift now is that a lot of open source software is on shaky ground, having been built by VC money searching a profit. This is the same force plaguing NPM and the JS community. The piper must be paid at any cost, even if it means compromising the open source part of the project
- jeena 7y ago
  I agree with that and it is one of the main reasons why I personally don't care for Open Source and make a huge distinction between it and Free Software.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    Free software has the exact same problem here. You can be 100% free software and still have VC funding you. For the context of this discussion, they're the same.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    There is essentially no difference between Open Source and Free Software, though people who prefer one label over the other tend to have different ideologies. In practice essentially everything that is recognized as Free Software by the FSF and the broader Free Software community is likewise recognized as Open Source by OSI and the broader Open Source community, and vice versa.

mcphage 7y ago

> One interesting constant is that most of the projects that felt a need to change licensing to react to business model issues over the years are dead ;) . Not all of them, mind you. But the failure rate seems really really high. The failure rate for all projects is pretty high, though.

michaelt 7y ago
That, and if it was going well they wouldn't have relicensed. Just like parachutists who open their reserve chute suffer more injuries than ones who don't :)

karlding 7y ago

> For example: It seems ridiculous now, but at one point authors were significantly squeezed by commercial distros offering support and feature work directly to customers for their packages. Something similar was discussed a few weeks ago with respect to procps [0] and the struggles of maintaining Open Source projects. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19936320

kemitchell 7y ago

Many authors are still squeezed out on support. RedHat is the breakaway winner there.

btown 7y ago

> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. No license change will fix that. That's a really extreme way to think about this. Consider this example: I lose 1 Utility Point for every new provider I need to contract with, set up monitoring for, set up billing etc. This balloons to losing 2 UP if that provider's in a different public cloud, but since many let you choose an AWS region, this is probably not a problem. I gain 5 UP from using Cockroach, because it saves me engineering time. And I gain 1 additional UP from using latest Cockroach because they're making real optimization breakthroughs. So pre-license-change, AWS Cockroach that tracks the latest release might net 6 UP, and Cockroach Cloud run by the company might only net 5 UP because of that cost of a new provider. But post-license change, Cockroach Cloud would be tied, because now I'm comparing the cost of a new provider against the cost of latest developments. And every single blog post I see about Cockroach developments pushes me in that direction. It's a really great move, though kind of a loss to open source. I wish the Cockroach folks the best.

DannyBee 7y ago
"That's a really extreme way to think about this." I would argue this is probably how most CTO's think about it unless forced at gunpoint to do otherwise.
kelnos 7y ago
There's another angle to it post-license-change: AWS Cockroach continues tracking the latest release and pays a licensing fee for the privilege of doing so. Your costs to use it might go up a tiny amount, but AWS would likely eat most of it, and, bonus: CockroachDB's development gets more funding. It's hard to put a price tag on knowing that an open source project your business depends on is well-funded enough that it's unlikely to disappear or be difficult to support.

matthewaveryusa 7y ago

You're completely missing the point. The point isn't to stop AWS from integrating. The point is to get a slice of the pie if AWS does decide to do an integration because now, with the new license, AWS needs to come to them first and ask for a license, which I'm sure they would give with reasonable terms.

bonzini 7y ago
What is less sure is that AWS would come and ask for a license, instead of cooking their own to get customers more locked-in to their platform.
yarrel 7y ago
This fantasy of getting the VCs their money from Amazon rather than non-existent customers is not going to play out as they want. If we assume Amazon are evil, they won't hand over a slice of the pie they'll just write a replacement. So no integration, no money, and no users. But at least it's not the fault of "Open Source" I guess.
- lmeyerov 7y ago
  Yep. The warning shot was GCP for these startups, not AWS.
cabalamat 7y ago
Indeed. If AWS makes a load of money out of Cockroach's hard work, why shouldn't Cockroach get a slice of it?
- growse 7y ago
  > Indeed. If AWS makes a load of money out of Cockroach's hard work, why shouldn't Cockroach get a slice of it? They should have thought about that before benefitting from it being open source.
  - cabalamat 7y ago

manigandham 7y ago

Exactly, customers want services that solve problems, not software that they have to operate. Clients rarely care what backend is actually running, which is why the clouds can offer the same APIs like Postgres and MongoDB backed by their own custom software.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

kelnos 7y ago

> The underlying issue here in this one is that people (apparently so far!) want to use AWS/GCP/etc more than they want to use mongo, redis, cockroach, or any particular technology. There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. And Amazon/Google/etc. still really wants to offer hosted CockroachDB, they can purchase a license, which helps fund development, and would probably be a financial rounding error to an outfit like AWS. > Unless something comes along that is "better enough" that people are willing to buck AWS to use it, this approach of relicensing fails. > (and the customers certainly don't care about your licensing scheme) I think you're misinterpreting how this license works and what it actually restricts, or you've overestimated the number of users this will affect. Most customers don't have to care; for the common use ("I want to install CockroachDB on AWS/GCP/my own server and use it as a data store for my product"), the licensing change is immaterial and they can use the software in the same way as they could when it was Apache-licensed. The only way this backfires is if Amazon creates a clean-room CockroachDB workalike and offers it as a hosted service. Even then, it's not a slam dunk: for example, I'd very much prefer to run redis myself on bare EC2 instances than use AWS ElastiCache, as the latter just generally doesn't meet my availability requirements. I've also once migrated a service from redis to DynamoDB and had a terrible experience during and after, so switching to a theoretical workalike isn't without its costs and risks.

freeone3000 7y ago
> There's nothing stopping people from using BSL-licensed software on AWS/GCP/etc., as long as they aren't running it for the purposes of offering a hosted version of that software. There is. This is no longer an OSI license, which means it's no longer on the automatic whitelist. Using CockroachDB now requires running through legal, which really makes me reconsider just using the hosted whatever offering, despite the issues.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  that's kind of a "for now" issue. eventually these will become common enough that things will shake out, but it will take years.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

I mean what the heck are they going to do when one of these tech giants pulls a Oracle and buys the whole project out? I'd much rather see Microsoft have taken MySQL over than Oracle. It's sad that I trust Microsoft with OSS projects more than I would most tech giants, well not sad because it's Microsoft, but sad because somebody like Google used to be seen as a good tech giant that worked on OSS, but then they extended and extinguished (Android, Chrome, Email, AMP so on).

pjmlp 7y ago
To realize why licenses like GPL exist, instead of pushing for non-copyleft licenses. We are slowly getting back to the shareware and PD days, specially since many kinds of FOSS applications are hard to monetize, e.g. desktop apps.