The Core offering made this palatable, one could fallback to Core features if the relationship with Cockroach Labs degraded, which made it possible to entertain the Enterprise license since there's was a way to walk back from it. But now there's no such mitigation available. By using non-PG native features, users of the Enterprise edition are accepting to get in bed with Cockroach Labs for effectively forever (databases), a single provider that has no competition.
I think this may backfire, as it now seems imprudent to go all in on Cockroach Labs. They may be nice folks today, but who knows who will run the place in 5y when the next round of squeeze comes?
I wish them the best, they're a great team and I always liked the project and toyed with it for years, and currently am involved with a paid Enterprise license. But this change in the dynamics is really giving me pause.
Getting in bed with a single vendor for an incredibly sticky tool comes with a _lot_ of risk. It took at least 17y for Amazon to get rid of its last Oracle database: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
IMO, it's not really open source if its run by a company that will eventually use its position to squeeze its users for cash.
I know it's not as popular or sexy as it used to be, but the whole point of a foundation like Apache was to avoid these situations, even more than the way the Linux Foundation is setup. Apache _explicitly_ manages projects to avoid these downsides.
- Single corporation ownership. Projects cannot get out of the Incubator unless they demonstrate a diverse and healthy community. That doesn't mean popular, it doesn't necessarily mean best-in-class, but it means that there shouldn't be just one entity backing a project.
- Membership in Apache is _personal_ not a seat for a given company. If you're a committer on an Apache project and you move jobs, you're _still_ a committer on that project
- The Foundation owns the trademarks. There have been fights about this in the past, but the whole idea is that the _community_ owns the name, so some corporation can't claim to be the sole or official owner by naming their company or product after the open source product.
The core premise of the Apache Software Foundation is community over code, that healthy, diverse communities have a better chance of standing the test of time than open source projects backed by a single individual or company. That's the thesis at least.
The is starkly different from several other foundations, notably the Linux Foundation or Eclipse Foundation which are modeled more around industry consortiums.
Both models have their place, but I believe Apache better models the core values many of us feel strongly about when it comes to free and open source software.
Sure <VC funded editor company> can have people spend years of their life working on something, but release it as open source because VCs are paying for it, and that leads to more mindshare, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Similar reasons to not use VSCode (commoditizing the complement by using billions of dollars from other products).
The "must be open source (I think they actually mean free as in $$) at all costs" crowd baffles me because the money to support the humans creating the software in the real world doesn't just magically appear.
What you say is true in that you shouldn't view a VC backed opensource offering as 'permanently' opensource by the same group.
As always: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
I'm not criticising a company's business decisions here, it might make sense for CockroachDB's business and profit goals; but such decisions also impact the decisions of dependent users, and I've been too long in this to recommend products and services with increasingly restrictive licensing or technical features that create unhealthy dependencies.
Since the AWSification of software licenses, I'm seeing more and more projects where a company is trying to get out of product/service X or license Y because they're unhappy or pivoting and the license or tech just doesn't fit the purpose any more, at high cost, occasionally even taking down the company.
I guess it's not trivial to balance abusive practices from big players that don't contribute much back with necessary freedom for smaller customers to experiment and freely move between technical solutions.
this is from CockroachDB license, pretty much straight out of Oracle's playbook:
> You will not perform Benchmarks against any products or services provided under terms that restrict performing and disclosing the results of benchmarks of such products or services, unless You have the lawful right to waive such terms. If You perform or disclose, or direct or permit any third party to perform or disclose, any Benchmark, You will include in any disclosure and will disclose to Licensor all information necessary to replicate such Benchmark, and You agree that Licensor may perform and disclose the results of benchmarks of Your products or services, irrespective of any restrictions on benchmarks in the terms governing Your products or services.
> a future Oracle/landlord
I don't think I've ever heard Oracle's business model described so accurately.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/weva2v/did_p...
we can see that as long as there were "expoitable resources" competition led to "good times".
as long as "software lordships" are competing for users, users tend to enjoy "lots of rights".
The same idea applies to political questions. A politician I like is proposing a policy I approve of. Great! Now what happens in the next election cycle, when a politician I don't like gets to use that same power to do something I don't approve of? Woops.
Building critical features on a single, closed-standard database means you can’t leave unless you rewrite all code that relied on it. The new code must integrate in the system well. The change must also happen without taking down the business.
For these reasons, politicians and laws change regularly but companies rarely escape database lockin.
Seems to me that it's still free for development, and small business use. If you're over $10M in revenue, with a business or product built on CockroachDB, they want a share of what they made possible. That seems totally reasonable to me.
> Annual term. Can be renewed subject to meeting the then-current eligibility requirements
I think CR Labs needs to make money from their activities. However they do it, should be in a way that incentivizes a win-win for them and their customers. Right now I think they attempted to "correct" for the uncaptured value, but the game theory switched toward discouraging adoption (in my perspective). I may be wrong, probably am.
They don't say that this was the reason for the change. What makes you presume it was "perceived" if they had said it was a reason for the change? I think it's the opposite: Too few used the open core edition, as it is quite limited. They want to increase the overall usage. They want to get growing companies using it. I think it's a fair move: Use it for free as long as you grow. You benefit. When you're large, pay us back. We benefit.
> feels like taking a bite of this edition is possibly getting into bed with a future Oracle/landlord type of relationship where you end up squeezed by your database vendor
That's about the strongest negative allegation one could come up with. Unobjective content and wording. There're thousands of software vendors or service providers out there (DB and not) that are competitive (they all are) but fair. Every of our much liked startups like Supabase, Neon, Vercel makes the entry very cheap or free and compensates for that with larger fees from the larger customers. There's nothing shady about it.
As I said, your post has to much negative bias in content and esp. wording. I don't see that. Factually, there's not risk at all. Every company (see Redis) can change their license of their future work. So you never have any guarantees. With or without a core edition.
If you want "true" open source, you can't choose a software developed by a company. The goal of a company is to make money. That should not be surprising.
I do a simple sanity check with any OSS software before using it:
- Make sure there is no contributor agreement requirements. This is a gigantic red flag that the license can and probably will be changed at some point.
- Make sure the license is not overly restrictive (like AGPL). I appreciate people have good reasons for picking this license; but it comes with some serious restrictions in a commercial environment. And like it or not, a lot of companies have active policies against this. Either way, I avoid anything with this license.
- Make sure the project is actively maintained. You don't want to get stuck with unmaintained software. Replacing dependencies is a PITA.
- Make sure the project is not overly dependent on VC funding. Startups fail all the time at which point anything they worked on turns into abandon ware.
- Ideally, make sure the project has a healthy diverse group of committers. Healthy here means more than one company is involved. Most projects that fail one or more of the above tests usually aren't very healthy in this sense.
They took down the blog post (I'd be curious to know why), but here is the announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
What started as a neat project with a vibrant and enthusiastic community is now just another dull beige enterprise vendor.
BSL is a totally fair compromise for commercial open source licensing imho.
If you see BSL as the first step to an announcement like today's, that's a fair criticism. Not sure how often that happens. But BSL doesn't disqualify software from being open source.
TBH that's nothing new for Cockroach. Even back when they were open core, the core was so restricted it didn't include backup & restore.
I think that may have changed, but only when they changed the license of the core to BSL, that is making the core non open source for three years.
Is there a better solution?
The first of these open source companies to switch to a closed source license because the big bad cloud was eating their lunch was MongoDB, which was already AGPL. The AGPL, by design, doesn't stop anyone from offering your code: it merely makes sure that they provide the source code and installation instructions to anyone who is using the service. Amazon is only to happy to provide this, and they always have for all of the services they offer (that require it). They even contribute to some of these projects.
Also, from the perspective of the free software movement at least, there is nothing to solve here. The whole point of the GPLs is that you don't get to have any special power over the code that you create: everyone who gets a copy has the exact same rights to it that you do, including the right to run your company under the ground if they can outcompete you.
> CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license. While the new license is a proprietary enterprise license, the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions.
The word you're looking for is "yes".
Discussion from five years ago:
Relicensing CockroachDB June 4, 2019 (487 points, 282 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097077
The blog post is a 404, here's the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
Other issue: Telemetry is mandatory on the free tier and cost to avoid it is to high. Some industries cannot have telemetry enable, or at least not without a heavy amount of reviews, think finance or healthcare.
This at least gets the full-fledged product in the door at startups. Say what you want about the timing or the BSL but I think this makes sense business-wise.
Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.
In my understanding, last time I talked to sales it's approximately 3x worse (because Planetscale offers 1 primary + 2 replicas) with CockroachDB you'd have to triple the CockroachDB license fees to even be competitive to achieve the same HA .... on hardware you purchase and run yourself.
For example, planetscale charges 3x as much per gb of storage if I read the pricing correctly.
weather it's a good idea to commit to it if you might not want to afford it once your revenue went up is another matter
and 10M$ annually is not little but also no absurdly huge, I mean a ~80 person company probably will struggle to be profitable with that revenue (if it's 80 good paying jobs like software developer).
Ran the core version for around 3 years in production for a smart city project. The company I worked for has been running it for around 6 years. Not sure what you are talking about. Of course, we would love to use features like stale replicas for exports. But this isn't something we absolutely need.
I do love Cockroach, but the old licensing model was pretty brutal if you required any enterprise features (ex: incremental backup).
For reference, some other data stores doing "horizontal scale of writes" ..any others I'm missing ?
* MySQL: Vitess, Planetscale, TiDB, MariaDB Spider
* Postgres: Citus, YugabyteDB, YDB, Neon
* SQLite: mvsqlite, marmot
* Document: ScyllaDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB
Also, not all alternatives listed are ACID compliant with serializable transactions like CockroachDB is.
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...
For me it was the multiple regions. It's like.. with that disabled why are we even here? Data residency is the whole point...
- employee
That is incredibly short notice.
We showed our lawyers that we were using the FOSS version. But, they didn't care and demanded we remove their product (despite being FOSS) immediately on all our systems.
That was a crazy crazy week.
You can say that's a problem with our lawyers. But still, who wants to go to court even if you know that you'll win eventually? It's expensive and incredibly annoying as an engineer to have to deal with lawyers.
But completely doing away with Core and requiring license keys even for free users [2] (which I assume is for revenue auditing purposes) ... I feel like that's a big step backwards. All of this because their Enterprise offering seemingly wasn't valuable enough (or from the comments -- it was too expensive).
I'd of focused there, on making Enterprise more valuable or more accessible, instead of doing something this drastic.
AFAICT, they're also doing away with BUSL and DOSP [3], which is a big bummer.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/cockroach-labs-shakes-up-i...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_u...
[2]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announ...
I don't understand why pure open-source license such as Apache2, MIT or BSD should be replaced with some source available license in order to increase profits from enterprise support contracts:
- The license change won't force cloud companies signing the enterprise agreement with you in most cases. If they didn't want paying you before the license change, why they will change their mind after the licence change? It is better from costs and freedom perspective forking open-source version of your product and using it for free like Amazon did with Elasticsearch.
- The license change leads to user base fragmentation - some of your users switch to forks run by cloud companies. Others start searching for alternative open-source products. So, you start losing users and market share after the license change.
- The license change doesn't bring you new beefy enterprise contracts, since it doesn't include any incentives for your users to sign such contracts.
That's why we at VictoriaMetrics aren't going to change the Apache2 license for our products. Our main goal is to provide good products to users, and to help users use these products in the most efficient way. https://docs.victoriametrics.com/goals/
You can't out compete Amazon here. I vastly prefer to use MIT or Apache code for my projects. It just makes things easier, but I also respect companies like yours have a right to seek a profit.
There is close to zero probability that Amazon will pay us for this product, so there is no any sense in changing the license from Apache2 to some BSL-like license, since they never sign long-term contracts with open-source product vendors.
Consider me skeptical.
P.S. IMHO, the main reason to change the license at CocroachDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, TimescaleDB, Grafana and other products is weak revenue growth rate. Shareholders falsely think that the license change may help increasing the revenue growth rate, but I don't understand why...
Cluster optimization, and enhanced security sure. And responsive support, absolutely.
Then you're two or three founders, you set up G Suite, and think oh, let's use SSO for this service, and then you're paying $$$.
We will be outlining our current direction in an RFD[2] that we will make public -- and we will also make public our RFDs that pertain to our selection of CockroachDB and the other alternatives that we evaluated; stay tuned!
[0] https://www.illumos.org/issues/15254
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/a-debugging...
The revenue driver as a driver for freemium tier is interesting as it seems like it would require company to regularly disclose their revenue to CockroachDB which looks intrusive.
In my daily life I use a lot of essentially source-available software that I pay for. I spend like 4+ hours a day every day in IntelliJ IDEA etc. I don't have a problem paying for software, I have huge problems paying for software that I don't sufficiently control and/or it's closed-source nature affects it's ability to get it's job done - i.e anything mission critical where uptime and security are paramount.
It's bad, but it's not unusual if you use closed-source software.
Assuming you pay for a license, does the license prevent you from building your own fork, and patching out the telemetry code?
A rug pull is when you buy into something and then it's taken away, like when a cryptocurrency token is busted out or you spend money on something and then it's cancelled or nerfed.
Don't like it? Write your own distributed fault tolerant database, or contribute an extension for Raft replication to the Postgres open source code base.
Sole source vendors are really risky, so open source gives a little control back to the buyer that the vendor won't lock them in then screw them later (oracle).
So now if you're paying for Cockroach, you're effectively on proprietary technology with no negotiating levers.
I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".
And as you're surely aware, competent OSS contribution is worth thousands
Thus it would be up to the the BSL promoters and marketers to decide whether or not this is a rugpull. As an open source user and proponent, I don't really care.
> Telemetry Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less)
So not free, then.
Is there already a popular fork?
Linux and Postgres are not reliant on any one commercial entity being successful for their continued existence. Even many of the maintainers are not reliant: if the company/foundation Linus Torvalds is working for at the moment has to close down, someone else will pay him to keep working on Linux. And even if he couldn't personally work on Linux anymore, there are enough other people in a similar position that Linux won't die.
I'm sure there are many much smaller and more obscure projects in a similar boat, especially in academia. If the code is not dependent on a single entity for maintenance, both in terms of someone knowing it and in terms of someone paying for it, then it will naturally thrive for a very long time.
If you're using it and paying for it, then this doesn't seem like a problem. If you're not using it, then it shouldn't matter. If you're using it but not paying for it, then maybe it's okay that you have to start paying for it.
I agree that current cloud providers are gaining more benefit from open source than they're putting in. So, it seems logical that the main developers want to recapture some of that.
On the other hand, open source is supposed to help build a bigger pie. If the pie gets bigger faster (i.e. more people using CockroachDB) then is the recapture worth it?
It seems the smaller companies think so. But, I don't know of a solid analysis that shows this to be true.
If you have more than $10M revenue, why on earth would you run the limited open core version of CochroachDB just to save some $1K-$10K (which is about the enterprise license cost). The open core version has limitations you don't want to miss esp. reg. backup and restore, encryption, follower reads. Now all those features are available for free if you're small.
They’re clowns.
It is definitively not one solution for all. There are many cases where it just won't work.
I would like to see more IBM Z servers being used. $$$$$$$$ though
Scaling up is fine for a few things, but hopeless for many others.
For multi-region, indeed, that will not be possible. Master-slave would be the way.
Does it perform significantly better to justify the cost? Back in the day I worked heavily with databases and we always tilted towards open source.
Then, there's a class of databases that tries to actively commit across multiple geographies. You pay a cost (in terms of latency, and typically also $$$), but when a commit succeeds, it has been written durably and reliably, using some consensus protocol, across multiple geographies.
The exemplar is probably Spanner, which uses atomic clocks to get very specific about time to narrow the latency gap as much as possible. Cockroach is broadly in the same class, although without atomic clocks I believe it's using network roundtrip measurements and/or some kind of mathematical time abstraction (like counters of come kind) to do the same thing. Can't ever be quite as fast, but you don't need atomic clocks!
What's _really_ funny is when people start out choosing Spanner because of its global replication, then decide it's too expensive, and settle on regional non-replicated Spanner DBs to save cost. Like, that's just a database, man. (Or maybe something slightly above a single database, like Aurora replicated across Availability Zones in the same Region).
Other folks can chime in, but there are a growing number of databases in this class. TiDB I believe is one. I _thought_ PlanetScale was just sharded mysql (Vitess+MySQL = clever auto-(re-)sharding), but perhaps it does replicated writes too - I see it getting mentioned here a bunch.
It really looks like every database company is trying to become Oracle. You want your clients to be trapped and unable to leave, so if you hypothetically just up the price by 30 or 40% upon renewal they either have to rewrite their entire stack, or pay the piper.
Presumably only a small subset of postgres users really need this feature - and those that do, are big enough to need an enterprise licence.
For example if I have a company that provisions databases on behalf of my clients, is this 10 million revenue cap for my company, or for the clients themselves .
The pricing isn't even on the website for self hosting, I presume it's one of those if you need to ask you can't afford it type situations.
Plus you're locking yourself into a vendor that has no worries about changing its terms again later on.
>Required only during the trial period. Businesses that cannot accommodate telemetry may contact sales to request an exception. Paid use does not require telemetry.
From some of the industries I've worked in, this is a massive red flag. We don't want to give you telemetry at any point in our process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNHMYp8M40k
Of special interest is that they are maintaining a completely free pre-rugpull version of CockroachDB that was forked before Cockroach's retroactively relicensed security fixes.
I would look seriously at using that instead of starting down Cockroach's free with telemetry offering.
The downsides are:
- slower - Postgres (if it can handle the amount of data, which is very much on proper hardware and partitioning of > 1B row tables) is much faster, esp. for joins
- features
- ecosystem (see the countless extensions)
- cost of course
This feels dishonest. What percentage of the world’s business need a system like CockroachDB? Of those, what percentage are under 10 million in revenue?
After quite a lot of work, introductions, and back and forth, they told us: sorry, Google Ventures is investing and we're kicking everyone else out, despite we expected an allocation at that point (50k, not very large). Not nice by them, and not nice by GV, but... Just another lesson learned in the epicenter of startup investing which is San Francisco. This was Feb 2015. Wow, almost 10 years ago. Time flies.
I am still happy to see they've been successful at building the company. I loved the product from the very beginning.
"CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license" sounds correct but it's still sidestepping the question. And "the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions" is completely shit. Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so.
Also, the use of this kind of "evolving our" and "advancing our" phrasing is so incredibly gross. No one speaks like this except in corporate announcements.
Because they'd be getting paid to do it for their company? I know of a few customers who, if they could, would have their employees contribute minor features to AWS services to solve issues.
CockroachDB hasn't been open source for over 5 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
Because they need a bug fix in the code as soon as possible without waiting for the vendor's priorities to match their own?
Because they get to use it for free?
Even if the name is taken, the community and independent providers would carry on.
> Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less)
Does that mean the cluster will stop working when it can no longer report?
:/
Postgres also has some separate large entities supporting it but it rolls up to the same codebase
[0] - https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/
Btw, Spanner and Cockroach both have fully serializable transactions. Even single-node Postgres doesn't do that by default (though it can) because they didn't think the performance tradeoff was worthwhile. Read-committed is good enough.
these things are easy to evaluate - 1. what's your appetite in running infra ? low - then use the SAAS offering 2. doable - then use a db that has good scalable solutions in this case mysql -> vitess since those products don't come from a database vendor. mongo might qualify too
> we are updating our licensing model to better serve our diverse community of users
One could hope that whoever wrote this at least had the decency to blush while doing so. So here's what's actually happening, as I understand it at least:
CockroachDB used to be split into "Core" and "Enterprise". Core was Apache 2.0 licensed (open source), Enterprise was BSL (fake open source, "source available", bullshit). After three years, BSL code becomes real open source. This setup that they are sunsetting is already pretty restrictive, and is by no means uncontroversially "open source".
The New And Improved(tm) idea they have to "better serve" their "diverse community of users" is even worse: it's free as in beer to use, but other than that it's completely proprietary, and it also includes *mandatory telemetry* for non-paying users. Any reference to "open" in regards to this product is a complete lie, because being able to read the source code does not make a product open source -- Microsoft allows you to read their code too, if you sign a piece of paper with them.
I've never used CockroachDB, but I'm glad I saw this, because now I know there's a 0% chance I will ever consider using it.
If you did that and called it GPL, things would be different.
"4. Does this mean CockroachDB is no longer open source?
CockroachDB will remain source available under a new license. While the new license is a proprietary enterprise license, the source code will still be available for viewing and contributions."
I mean... "The answer is kinda sorta 'No', but we really would prefer not to phrase it like that."
Never sign contributions agreement: it will be used against you when the license inevitably get changed.
> Individuals and businesses, under $10M in annual revenue, can use CockroachDB Enterprise for free
Plenty of us have had to deal with this scenarios before with Oracle. Cheap or free to get started, then your product takes off and Oracle shows up and starts to demand their cut. I'm not suggesting that Cockroach is the new Oracle, but this type of licensing introduces a significant uncertainty into your future plans.
Ignorance was maybe excusable the first 15 times, but if you keep falling for corporate owned rug-pull OSS packages in 2024, you deserve what's coming for you.
Weird databases are NFTs for startup founders. You're not too cool for Postgres. Use it.
You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.
If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money on useful software.
There are new hooks, but paywalling capabilities was not the point here.
It's still nice that I can audit the code and contribute (unpaid) changes, but I no longer assume anyone is acting in good faith.
