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(From the FAQs) How does the change to the BSL affect me as a CockroachDB user? It likely does not. As a CockroachDB user, you can freely use CockroachDB or em

by samblr 6y ago

(From the FAQs) How does the change to the BSL affect me as a CockroachDB user? It likely does not. As a CockroachDB user, you can freely use CockroachDB or embed it in your applications (irrespective of whether you ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). The only thing you cannot do is offer CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. - - - - - Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do! Of late there has been plenty of fear mongering when it comes to licensing. I wonder if this is some paid blogs from cloud companies which helps form some opinions or the age old open source license-and-principles which hold little water with predatory cloud companies around.

nix23 6y ago
>Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do! But i just wrote "be aware of it", with that license i don't consider it "Free Software", just imagine Apache or Nginx would do that. On the other hand I'm totally fine if they want to protect themself from leeches like Amazon/Google/Oracle/IBM.
- bostik 6y ago
  > imagine Apache or Nginx would do that. Nginx will likely do something similar, very soon. It's not that long ago when F5 bought them, with clear plans to offer paid-only features while the core itself remains open. Give it another 5 years and I expect nginx to propagate some of those special features to the open-source version, but with the restriction that you can't offer them as a service vendor without a specific license.
  - takeda 6y ago
    I never understood the appeal of Nginx. I mean, I understand the web server, it's much easier than setting up apache, and before apache introduced event based mpm it was also much faster. What I mean is the load balancing functionality of F5. It's in the same league as proxy support in apache[1]. Hardly comparable to for example what HAProxy provides, yet for some reason F5 (which is a leader in hardware load balancing, sadly though with public cloud that market is shrinking) found it interesting. Is it because of the name recognition, and they plan on turning Nginx into a proper load balancer? Because in terms of functionality Nginx is not even close to their LTM (even HAProxy is missing a lot of its features). [1] I'm talking about the non paid version, there are some health checks in paid although still the support is rather weak.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Nginx will likely do something similar, very soon. Ahh the oracle of Delphi...if they do that, everyone will change to caddy or apache and that's exactly why they don't do it. Amazon/Google etc can give a shit about nginx, if they change the licenses they will just hurt themself.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do! the BSL is not an open source license, but I can see where they are coming from, and I don't have a problem with it. With the one exception than I bet it will slow adoption, which is really just selfish on my part, because I want to use it and it will be an easier sell the more people are aware of it. Honestly I'm hoping that postgres just adopts the best parts of cockroach and i won't need to keep bringing it up to grossed out managers.
- samblr 6y ago
  >> the BSL is not an open source license, but I can see where they are coming from I wish more people could pause and appreciate this. I understand little on how an open source license gets approved by OSI body etc. But Im sure there is a need to mitigate threats from AWS and likes. We can't be far from today from where AWS takes a github URL as input and starts offering it as its own service!
tyingq 6y ago
There was a different licensing issue around backups, where only the paid version had a reasonable way to back up and restore your data. Has that improved?
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  Incremental backups are a feature of the Enterprise version. Full data backups are supported with the free version.
- irfansharif 6y ago
  Yes, the distributed backup/restore functionality was folded into the free version in our last release. See https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/distributed-backup-restore/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/distributed-backup-restor....
ensignavenger 6y ago
I know how their license negatively impacts me, I don't need some company to tell me that "all is well". I know that thier license means that if my requirements and Coackroach Labs business model diverge, I will be unable to fork the code and build a proper open source community around it. I know that I will (likely) never be able to buy a managed coackroach DB service from any vendor other than CoakroachLabs, no matter who acquires them or how badly they manage their service or how well their managed service and term offerings match what I need. I know that no matter how much I may want to pool resources with some one else to build features I need or fix bugs that I need fixed, I only have on viable option and that is to go through Cockroach, because there is no way to create a viable community fork of the project. Them pretending that their use of the BSL doesn't impact end users and end-user freedom is marketing department BS. They are free to license the software they develop under whatever license they want. I appreciate their past and future open source contributions and the technical achievements they have made, but their use of the BSL license rather than an open source license makes their product highly undesirable in my business.
- vvern 6y ago
  I don't think your points are totally wrong. I especially think that your points hold water if you were to feel the need to set out to build your community fork or competing hosted offering in the next couple of years. Secondarily, I think that if your company had the resources to staff developers to build out a whole hosted offering, I can tell you that CRL would love to be a partner and understand what's going wrong. Maybe that's unacceptable for some sort of other reason but it's not obvious to me what that is. Yes the license means that real-time development of the project, on some level, relies on coordinating with its developers, which do, on the whole, work for a company. All this being said, it sounds like you've got a better vision for how projects like this should get funded and built. How should society fund projects like CRDB? I think there's a very wide range of reasonable answers that fall in different parts of the fantasy spectrum. For now, in 2020s American capitalism, the BSD license approach, at least to my tastes (which are hecka biased), feels pretty good.
  - ensignavenger 6y ago
offtop5 6y ago
So if I write OfftopAPI as a service which basically deploys Cockroach for clients , but adds a thin Node JS API on top , is that ok ? Feels like you could play a game of chicken with them. I know many big companies would probably stick to postgres with this in mind. And also makes it feel like they might just change the license later
- nix23 6y ago
  Welcome to the "no free software world", now your are in the same position as if you give your customers a Oracle-db access.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Is CRDB that much better to justify all of this. Getting your boss to buy into a new tech is hard enough
    - nix23 6y ago
      I just know that i don't like proprietary software and crazy licenses.

by samblr 6y ago

nix23 6y ago

>Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do! But i just wrote "be aware of it", with that license i don't consider it "Free Software", just imagine Apache or Nginx would do that. On the other hand I'm totally fine if they want to protect themself from leeches like Amazon/Google/Oracle/IBM.

bostik 6y ago
> imagine Apache or Nginx would do that. Nginx will likely do something similar, very soon. It's not that long ago when F5 bought them, with clear plans to offer paid-only features while the core itself remains open. Give it another 5 years and I expect nginx to propagate some of those special features to the open-source version, but with the restriction that you can't offer them as a service vendor without a specific license.
- takeda 6y ago
  I never understood the appeal of Nginx. I mean, I understand the web server, it's much easier than setting up apache, and before apache introduced event based mpm it was also much faster. What I mean is the load balancing functionality of F5. It's in the same league as proxy support in apache[1]. Hardly comparable to for example what HAProxy provides, yet for some reason F5 (which is a leader in hardware load balancing, sadly though with public cloud that market is shrinking) found it interesting. Is it because of the name recognition, and they plan on turning Nginx into a proper load balancer? Because in terms of functionality Nginx is not even close to their LTM (even HAProxy is missing a lot of its features). [1] I'm talking about the non paid version, there are some health checks in paid although still the support is rather weak.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Nginx will likely do something similar, very soon. Ahh the oracle of Delphi...if they do that, everyone will change to caddy or apache and that's exactly why they don't do it. Amazon/Google etc can give a shit about nginx, if they change the licenses they will just hurt themself.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

Cockroach is asking not to take open source and start offering it as a service. Which sounds like completely reasonable thing to do! the BSL is not an open source license, but I can see where they are coming from, and I don't have a problem with it. With the one exception than I bet it will slow adoption, which is really just selfish on my part, because I want to use it and it will be an easier sell the more people are aware of it. Honestly I'm hoping that postgres just adopts the best parts of cockroach and i won't need to keep bringing it up to grossed out managers.

samblr 6y ago
>> the BSL is not an open source license, but I can see where they are coming from I wish more people could pause and appreciate this. I understand little on how an open source license gets approved by OSI body etc. But Im sure there is a need to mitigate threats from AWS and likes. We can't be far from today from where AWS takes a github URL as input and starts offering it as its own service!

tyingq 6y ago

There was a different licensing issue around backups, where only the paid version had a reasonable way to back up and restore your data. Has that improved?

squeaky-clean 6y ago
Incremental backups are a feature of the Enterprise version. Full data backups are supported with the free version.
irfansharif 6y ago
Yes, the distributed backup/restore functionality was folded into the free version in our last release. See https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/distributed-backup-restore/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/distributed-backup-restor....

ensignavenger 6y ago

I know how their license negatively impacts me, I don't need some company to tell me that "all is well". I know that thier license means that if my requirements and Coackroach Labs business model diverge, I will be unable to fork the code and build a proper open source community around it. I know that I will (likely) never be able to buy a managed coackroach DB service from any vendor other than CoakroachLabs, no matter who acquires them or how badly they manage their service or how well their managed service and term offerings match what I need. I know that no matter how much I may want to pool resources with some one else to build features I need or fix bugs that I need fixed, I only have on viable option and that is to go through Cockroach, because there is no way to create a viable community fork of the project. Them pretending that their use of the BSL doesn't impact end users and end-user freedom is marketing department BS. They are free to license the software they develop under whatever license they want. I appreciate their past and future open source contributions and the technical achievements they have made, but their use of the BSL license rather than an open source license makes their product highly undesirable in my business.

vvern 6y ago
I don't think your points are totally wrong. I especially think that your points hold water if you were to feel the need to set out to build your community fork or competing hosted offering in the next couple of years. Secondarily, I think that if your company had the resources to staff developers to build out a whole hosted offering, I can tell you that CRL would love to be a partner and understand what's going wrong. Maybe that's unacceptable for some sort of other reason but it's not obvious to me what that is. Yes the license means that real-time development of the project, on some level, relies on coordinating with its developers, which do, on the whole, work for a company. All this being said, it sounds like you've got a better vision for how projects like this should get funded and built. How should society fund projects like CRDB? I think there's a very wide range of reasonable answers that fall in different parts of the fantasy spectrum. For now, in 2020s American capitalism, the BSD license approach, at least to my tastes (which are hecka biased), feels pretty good.
- ensignavenger 6y ago

offtop5 6y ago

So if I write OfftopAPI as a service which basically deploys Cockroach for clients , but adds a thin Node JS API on top , is that ok ? Feels like you could play a game of chicken with them. I know many big companies would probably stick to postgres with this in mind. And also makes it feel like they might just change the license later

nix23 6y ago
Welcome to the "no free software world", now your are in the same position as if you give your customers a Oracle-db access.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Is CRDB that much better to justify all of this. Getting your boss to buy into a new tech is hard enough
  - nix23 6y ago
    I just know that i don't like proprietary software and crazy licenses.