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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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoRight, 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 agoTrue. 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 agoYa, and I wouldn't, that's why I mentioned rebranding it.