15 ms·

CockroachDB license change

389 points by Cwizard 2y ago

ukuina 2y ago
> On November 18, 2024, we will eliminate our Core offering and consolidate on a single, robust CockroachDB Enterprise license That is incredibly short notice.
- arccy 2y ago
  only a problem if you need to update
  - kragen 2y ago
    even then you've had five years notice that enshittification was coming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History
    - cvwright 2y ago
      Making $10M ARR companies pay for the software that they use is not enshittification.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i mean, yes? it is? software you can't use without someone else's permission is obviously shittier than open-source software you can fork, even if you're a big company. perhaps especially if you're a big company. and software that sends telemetry to the vendor is obviously shittier than software that doesn't
        CyberDildonics 2y ago
        i mean, no? it isn't? changing the license doesn't change the software? the software still works the same way?
        nijave 2y ago
        In this case, they cancelled a product (core) and replaced it with a different product that has an additional new license (enterprise edition with a free tier) So not just a license change
        redwood 2y ago
        Well if the company can build a business then you can get great software to use... while in theory it would be great if a bunch of incredible software were done purely in the spirit of community open source, in practice that's pretty limited
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - nijave 2y ago
        $10M ARR doesn't mean anything. You could still be a tiny company with terrible financials by selling your product at a loss (a startup) It's just an arbitrary number
  - veggieroll 2y ago
    This hasn't been my experience. After another VC-backed software switched licenses, we continued using an older, open source version licensed Apache 2. But that didn't stop their lawyers from trying to shake us down, claiming we were using the latest, enterprise version. We just showed up in their telemetry as using their product and they came a knockin. I imagine that their telemetry failed to distinguish who was running old FOSS from the latest proprietary one. 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.
geenat 2y ago
Overall I feel like this is a step in the right direction. 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
- ko_pivot 2y ago
  I don’t believe Neon supports multiple write nodes.
  - tristan957 2y ago
    It currently does not, but it's something we would like to eventually support. - employee
- sho 2y ago
  > if you required any enterprise features For me it was the multiple regions. It's like.. with that disabled why are we even here? Data residency is the whole point...
- madduci 2y ago
  The only thing I don't like is the mandatory telemetry.
  - ezekg 2y ago
    I don't like the fact that even free users need an annual license key.
- Thaxll 2y ago
  Most of those solutions are not on part with Cockroach, Cockroach is basically Spanner usable outside of Google. So global transaction with cluster world wide.
tvink 2y ago
Free license: > Telemetry Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less) So not free, then. Is there already a popular fork?
- sigmonsays 2y ago
  This is really painful, I don't want this pattern of data collection being common, Telemetry included.
- kragen 2y ago
  it hasn't been open-source since 02019 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History so if there are popular forks they'd have to be five years old
  - cvwright 2y ago
    BSL code automatically converts to open source at a specified date. So probably several releases since then are now as open source as anything else in the world. And if not, then they will be soon - BSL allows a maximum 5 year delay.
    - kragen 2y ago
      that may be (i haven't read the license) but i'm not persuaded it's relevant if nobody forked it five years ago, they probably aren't going to fork it now if somebody did fork it five years ago, they probably aren't going to try to merge in new source code drops as they convert to open source
      - cvwright 2y ago
        Then why do you care? If nobody is going to fork it anyway, what’s the benefit of being open source from the beginning?
        kragen 2y ago
PaywallBuster 2y ago
at least should still cover a lot of businesses under the free tier > Individuals and businesses, under $10M in annual revenue, can use CockroachDB Enterprise for free
- mrweasel 2y ago
  You just can't build anything new based on CockroachDB now, because the pricing for self-hosted is "Contact us". So if you build a product you'd need to contact them first and kinda guess how successful you'll be. Maybe it's fine and the license cost isn't a big deal, or it will completely ruin your business case. 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tschellenbach 2y ago
We will probably end up removing CockroachDB from our infra due to this change. It also makes me a bit worried about their long term viability. How much ARR does CockroachDB have and what was their last round valuation...?
- Cwizard 2y ago
  What will you switch to? I feel like there isn’t a good alternative.
  - shadow28 2y ago
    YugabyteDB is a commonly used alternative.
    - jen20 2y ago
      According to Wikipedia, Yugabyte (the company) has taken 290 million dollars of VC money. It's probably a safe assumption that they will follow the same path soon enough.
      - spiffytech 2y ago
        While the future is unwritten, FWIW in 2019 Yugabyte moved to Apache 2.0, open-sourcing features that were previously paywalled. They wrote up their rationale here: https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/why-we-changed-yugabyte-db-licensing-to-100-open-source/ https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/why-we-changed-yugabyte-db-lic...
        redwood 2y ago
        How's their business growing compared to Cockroach?
        riku_iki 2y ago
        This won't prevent them back to paywall in future if investors ask.
sho 2y ago
Probably a good move. I'd looked at Cockroach before for a project - they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless, while Enterprise was some absolutely insane figure for a cash-strapped startup. While it was possible to hotfix the code to get around their restrictions - we eventually just used something else. 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.
- Cwizard 2y ago
  What did you use instead?
  - sho 2y ago
    It was a data domiciling project so just went with sharding in good old postgres. Cockroach would have been perfect but it was going to cost something like $5k/m just to turn it on..
- geenat 2y ago
  The enterprise per core is still an insane figure, based on last time I interacted with sales- would be amazing if this was revised, too, to be more competitive with Planetscale, etc. Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.
  - dathinab 2y ago
    through cash strapped startups can now use the "free" enterprise version until they reach 10M$ annual revenue 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).
    - brianwawok 2y ago
Icathian 2y ago
So the obvious question is, which big shops were using the Core version that ended up prompting this change? I know of one or two but I'm curious if there are some obvious big fish.
- turtle_heck 2y ago
  Weren't Oxide using CockroachDB?
  - nindalf 2y ago
    Seems like. There are 5.2k hits in their codebase for "cockroach" (https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Aoxidecomputer+cockroach&type=code https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Aoxidecomputer+cockroach&...)
    - ccmcarey 2y ago
      Looks like those hits are because they forked it https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cockroach https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cockroach (no changes since then though)
  - wave-trample-0h 2y ago
    Doesn't this only affect companies with more than $10M in revenue? This change should only affect companies that are a going concern and are apt to remain in business.
  - bcantrill 2y ago
    Yes, we are -- and it's worked well for us! (The most acute issue we hit was actually a gnarly OS issue[0][1].) That said, we are not currently a Cockroach Labs customer and we will not be becoming one for purposes of licensing CockroachDB. We are abiding by the terms of the BSL, and the version that we are on (22.1) will be Apache licensed in May 2025; by that point, we will maintain our own Apache-licensed fork for purposes of being the database for the control plane included in the Oxide rack. 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 https://www.illumos.org/issues/15254 [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/a-debugging-odyssey https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/a-debugging... [2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001
ko_pivot 2y ago
As much as this has the vibes of a classic OSS rug pull, as a Cockroach user, I don’t really take it that way. First of all, it was already not open source and secondly, the free to use version was missing key features like follower reads and incremental backups.
- api 2y ago
  Someone creating free software and changing the license on software they created isn't a "rug pull" in any sense of the word. You paid $0 and contributed nothing. What rug is being pulled? 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.
  - theamk 2y ago
    CockroachDB raised >$500M in funding, and a big reason for this was it's high number of users. That high number would be a lot lower if it wasn't a free software.
  - warvariuc 2y ago
    > You paid $0 and contributed nothing I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".
    - ted_dunning 2y ago
      From the standpoint of the people paying the developers of said software, it is exactly like paying $0.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        No, it's not. If they're planning a rug pull, they very much care that you took effort to integrate their free offering into your infrastructure, because they care that you're sitting firmly on the rug before they can pull it.
scblock 2y ago
Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". "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.
- dymk 2y ago
  > Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. Because they get to use it for free?
- dastbe 2y ago
  > Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. 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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ezekg 2y ago
  > Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". CockroachDB hasn't been open source for over 5 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
  - scblock 2y ago
    Yet it's one of the top questions on their announcement page and they won't clearly answer it.
AYBABTME 2y ago
I understand the goal, and the perceived abuse of the Core edition. But the problem with the Enterprise edition is that it's quite expensive, "contact us" salesy, and it 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. 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-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ROFISH 2y ago
  Agreed. I talked with them in the past and the pricing was far too expensive to make it worth it. As always: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
  - immibis 2y ago
    Sometimes quotes are affordable for small businesses - no harm in asking.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  There is no abuse here. They released software under a specific license (BSL at that, plenty of opportunities to restrict).
xnx 2y ago
What are the remaining use cases for CockroachDB where there isn't a better/open-source alternative?
- Cwizard 2y ago
  multi-master writes with serializable transactions
  - sroussey 2y ago
    FoundationDB
    - geenat 2y ago
      AFAIK more of a document store unless you use mvsqlite The architecture is ingenious, though.
    - Cwizard 2y ago
      Does not have a SQL API (or something similar). The record layer is interesting but requires your application to be build in Java.
- c4pt0r 2y ago
  TiDB
_joel 2y ago
Enforced telemetry for free users? That's gross.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Not only that, but according to the licence agreement, there are "technical countermeasures" to stop you from using the product if you were to block telemetry with a firewall (presumably it stops working if the telemetry server doesn't send back an acknowledgement), and "You understand and agree that Licensor may use and disclose personal information collected as part of Telemetry in accordance with Licensor's Privacy Policy" ... wait, what?
  - michaelt 2y ago
    In the closed source world it's common enough that free trials will be something along the lines of "we give you a license key tied to your name, and every time you start the software it calls into our license server to validate the license key" It's bad, but it's not unusual if you use closed-source software.
    - ezekg 2y ago
      Sure, but I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use a signed license file with a start- and stop-date in this case. Lots of companies, especially enterprises, run air-gaps and telemetry just won't work there. And they should know that... it's their target market after all...
    - red_admiral 2y ago
      I guess this is fine for a free _trial_, if you can host it in some separate firewalled-off subnet where it doesn't touch your real customer data. The issue here is that if you're an org with less than $10M turnover, you're currently on the Core plan and don't want to negotiate the full "Enterprise" licence (which is presumably priced towards larger users than you anyway), then you can't use the thing at all anymore unless you agree to telemetry and some vague disclosure of personal data thing that will get your lawyers in a spin (especially if you serve states in which GDPR applies). EDIT: oh, and PCI-DSS requirements if you want to take credit cards? That's going to be fun.
dzonga 2y ago
predictable and pretty good business move. 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
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  Whats your appetite for a SaaS vendor unpredictably and without enough warning changing the price they are charging you, or pushing updates to the SaaS that break your business? Better get it put into the contract.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    Their target customers for self-hosting are Enterprises with a capital E who are used to signing multi-year software contracts.
    - ensignavenger 2y ago
      I don't know much about CockroachDB's business, so I was just speaking in general about SaaS products and licensing non-open source software.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
You need an enterprise that's already decided to use CockroachDB if your trial offer is only 30 days long. We've barely walked around the car & kicked the tires before that trial runs out; it's not respectful of the time it takes enterprises to move at all.
999900000999 2y ago
I'm trying to figure out how this is better than Postgress ? 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.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  CockroachDB is basically "run postgres on a cluster with more fault tolerance" - you can have machines (or entire datacenters) going down, netsplits etc. and as long as there's enough infra up to keep going, it will. Presumably only a small subset of postgres users really need this feature - and those that do, are big enough to need an enterprise licence.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    I'll admit I haven't worked directly in this space in a good while, but the whole mystery terms really rubs me the wrong way . 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.
- zellyn 2y ago
  For most databases (like Postgres), you typically run a single database (per shard, possibly), and replicate changes to a live read-only backup as fast as possible. If the live R/W database fails, you quickly switch the backup to R/W, and point traffic there instead. 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.
PeterZaitsev 2y ago
Finally all Open Source pretense is dropped. CockroachDB becomes Enterprise+Cloud database company with a free tier, not dissimilar from Oracle. 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.
- bonzini 2y ago
  Props for calling it source available and not hiding behind "you can't police the meaning of open source", though.
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    I actually think source available software is great. Not every piece of software can survive as OSS but source available eliminates most the downsides of closed-source software from a technical perspective. 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.
    - arlcode 2y ago
      I certainly agree. And it makes sense (for Enterprise "tech stack" software). A license violator would just crack your software anyway and legitimate paying users pay for it and want less hassle. You probably will save on some support calls if their engineers can take a quick look themselves. Same goes for any "secret Sauce" in the Code. Most Software of that Type isn't algorithmically novel enough to warrant drm and obfuscation. And again a serious criminal comoetitor would spend the money to reverse it
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I am a great fan of scaling vertically as far sa possible on DB servers. These days that is pretty damn high. It avoids a lot of prickly edge cases. 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
- ted_dunning 2y ago
  It doesn't solve for required multi-region data storage. Nor for data center failure resilience. Scaling up is fine for a few things, but hopeless for many others.
  - JackSlateur 2y ago
    For data-center failure, it does: the underlying storage can be resilient. For multi-region, indeed, that will not be possible. Master-slave would be the way.
kelsey98765431 2y ago
Another database fails to be better and ends up worse. This is why we use DAL agnosticism.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
I've never seen this database used by anyone in real life.
- traderj0e 2y ago
  I'm skeptical of this kind of multi-master horizontal DBMS to begin with. Never used Cockroach but have used Spanner, and even besides the $, you pay with complexity, slowness, and limitations. Even the in-betweens like Citus have their issues. As far as I can tell, the world runs on traditional DBMSes like Postgres, maybe with HA. If you're big, you run multiple and shard at the application level. I don't think there's a better option yet. 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.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Is Netflix[0] real life enough? [0] - https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/
  - redwood 2y ago
    That's impressive. I'm genuinely surprised they have users at this scale. Are there others?
    - dilyevsky 2y ago
      I heard that doordash ran a cluster serving >1M qps, there maybe still a setup at square/block where the team originated from
      - redwood 2y ago
        I guess most of the larger deployments are self-managed rather than their SaaS offering... Do you think this is mostly running on top of hyperscaler infrastructure? Or in traditional enterprise data centers? I'm just surprised because I never see it
ezekg 2y ago
I posted it on Twitter, but I feel like revenue-based licensing models unnecessarily push the compliance burden onto the user. It's an honor system, and even they admit it [0]; even Unity, who also uses a revenue-based model, admits it [1]. I'd prefer licensing models that are able to automatically segment users into customers at the software-level, such as a feature-based or usage-based model. For example, they could segment on CPU count or disk size, requiring an Enterprise offering for databases or clusters over a certain threshold. 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-its-licensing-to-force-bigger-companies-to-pay/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/cockroach-labs-shakes-up-i... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_unity_know_how_much_you_earn/dvbc1fz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_u... [2]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announcement/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announ... [3]: https://opensource.org/dosp https://opensource.org/dosp
Eumenes 2y ago
They're following the Mongo playbook
joeblubaugh 2y ago
> Even by conservative estimates, the vast majority of the world’s businesses will meet the eligibility requirements for the Enterprise Free Tier license 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?
- Nathanba 2y ago
  if it were really the case that the vast majority of businesses doesn't need to pay then they'll just adjust it down to 1 million in revenue
rmoriz 2y ago
How to comply with telemetry in air-gapped environments?
- sroussey 2y ago
  You don’t. I assume the free version is not licensed for that use case. :/
jappgar 2y ago
"Open-source" in 2024 is a synonym for "ransomware." 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.
- max-privatevoid 2y ago
  This is why you should look for software that calls itself "FOSS" or "Free Software" instead. Avoid CLAs at all costs as well. If the software is licensed under a GPL-like license without a CLA and has had significant contributions from multiple people, this relicensing rugpull is nearly impossible.
simonebrunozzi 2y ago
I spotted this company in their seed stage and wanted to invest. The founders asked us to provide names for reference checks, etc - a bit unusual, but we were almost done with the commitment, so why not? 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.
Thoreandan 2y ago
> Does this mean that 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. The word you're looking for is "yes".
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  I'm just so shocked that VC is following the open source for a while then fuck you business playbook. If only there was prior art to warn people that this was a risk, like all the other VC backed software projects.
- ezekg 2y ago
  I said it somewhere else, but this FAQ is likely because most people think "source available on GitHub" = "open source", so they're just answering the low-hanging-fruit even if the question is technically incorrect. Not everybody is aware of the differences between "on GitHub" vs OSS, the OSI, the FSF, etc.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Coming next decade: companies marketing their product as "open source" because they have an empty GitHub repo for issues.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    Or a repository with some source code under a free license, and then some .so and executables in a subdirectory. I'm looking at you Sciter.
- croes 2y ago
  It's always obvious when they need multiple sentences to answer a simple yes or no question.
- lolinder 2y ago
  It was already not open source, hence the weasel language. "It will remain source available" is the second-most straightforward way to say "it already wasn't, but it's awkward to admit that given that we allowed you to misunderstand the license for five years". Discussion from five years ago: Relicensing CockroachDB June 4, 2019 (487 points, 282 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097077 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.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
JonChesterfield 2y ago
Ensure your data is secure with our mandatory telemetry. No deal.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
That's another company that feels like they don't want to be an OSS company after all. After Elastic, I pay more attention to contributor agreements. Basically I consider any project that requires transfer of copyright for OSS contributions as likely to change their license at some point. It's fine; I'm not against that sort of thing and I sometimes pay for software. But I like to know what I'm getting into before and I don't appreciate the bait and switch. It also guides decisions as to what I contribute to actively. 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.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  tbf I think both GNU and Linux require copyright assignment, and I don't think that either of those are likely to swap licenses any time soon
  - orra 2y ago
    FYI, you're right about GNU (by and large), but mistaken about Linux.
    - ddtaylor 2y ago
      GNU has contributor agreements?
tbarbugli 2y ago
https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/graphs/contributors https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/graphs/contributors
tristor 2y ago
I like the technology here, but at the same time I feel like they've been on this trajectory since the beginning. It's just another VC-backed company using open source for marketing, without any legitimate desire to actually be open source. At least now they've pulled the wool off of it.
osigurdson 2y ago
I think the reality is, only exceeding common codebases (Linux and Postgres for example), can survive with an open source model. If the value created by the product is 1M times greater than the costs, fine, a way to support it will materialize. Otherwise, economics take over and people need to get paid. The fact that source is publicly available is largely irrelevant.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  I don't think the point is how common it is, it's about a organizational model. 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.
alexvitkov 2y ago
I'm not even going to read this, we all know what it is and we all know it's just the first step in a long series of very shitty changes, expect all new development to be in the "contact us" tier. 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.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  This actually moves stuff out of the "contact us" tier, where it used to be, and makes everything available to all. There are new hooks, but paywalling capabilities was not the point here.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    New hooks like disabling my database if the telemetry API call fails?
  - ezekg 2y ago
    Per their announcement, it sounds like a free user will have to get an annual Enterprise Free license key to use it. I'd hope that'd be automated, but could also be a "contact us" tier to audit revenue. Time will tell.
- zachmu 2y ago
  Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks. 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.
  - vdfs 2y ago
    Without marketing bs, what's something that can be done only with Cockroach and not postgres or other truly-OSS alternatives? I'm curios because I've been reading news about it forever but never had the chance to work with it
pianoben 2y ago
Wow, what a rug-pull! Good luck to Cockroach Labs, but I doubt their product is entrenched-enough to make this strategy sustainable - it's going to _kill_ growth.
mehulashah 2y ago
It seems a shame that to grow, companies are backing away from the vector that got them there: open source. 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.
GiorgioG 2y ago
Yeah no thanks, I'll stick with Postgres
dilyevsky 2y ago
Anyone here migrated to TiDB from cockroach and can share experience? Asking for a friend…
- geenat 2y ago
  It's a lot more moving parts unfortunately and the TiDB team has historically little interest in fixing that.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    Single binary is for sure preferable but given that they have k8s operator shouldn't be too bad? CRDB also had its faults - their CDC to kafka had terrible reliability even on enterprise versions.
  - c4pt0r 2y ago
    TiDB CTO here, I think that a clear boundary between components is beneficial for the maintainability of a distributed systems like TiDB, and automated deployment tools like `tiup`(https://tiup.io https://tiup.io) and the Operator of Kubernetes shield end-users from this complexity in order to maintain best practices in deployment. While still providing enough debugging details for advanced users.
    - misiek08 2y ago
      That’s one of worst part of TiDB to be honest. Single boundary with simple flag listing peers (or DNS SRV address) would bring you a lot of smaller companies and/or hobbyists who will contribute. Having different parts written in different languages is awful too, because it brings some micro improvements (if any) but makes project look complex and scary for many new-comers :(
kimungdotcom 2y ago
[dead]
steeeeeve 2y ago
I'm really not a big fan of holding backups and DR behind licensing. That's base level functionality. That and row level security, but at least with row level, I get that there has been a lot of time and energy expended on that feature. Cluster optimization, and enhanced security sure. And responsive support, absolutely.
- paxys 2y ago
  The ability to turn off telemetry collection is missing from the free version as well. No thanks.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  It's the same with SSO, and I think it hurts some companies more than it helps. SSO too often is an arbitrary selection for "Enterprise/$Call Us". 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 $$$.
paxys 2y ago
I get wanting large companies and cloud providers to pay, but mandatory telemetry collection in the self-hosted version of the product is an absolute non starter.
purpleblue 2y ago
I guess I don't get it. CockroachDB is decidedly an enterprise product. There's no need for even a medium sized company to require distributed database the likes of CockroachDB. If you're a small company using it, you're just using it for fun, and you're probably not paying. 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.
- smw 2y ago
  There are quite a few situations where running the (previously) open source core was a good fit for business problems which would become unprofitable if the enterprise license was used.
victorbjorklund 2y ago
another open source project has died. At least we will always have Postgres.
znpy 2y ago
Friendly reminder that if you contributed code but signed a contribution agreement (which assigns copyright on the code contribution to cockroachlabs) you’ve got nothing to complain about. Never sign contributions agreement: it will be used against you when the license inevitably get changed.
somastoma 2y ago
[dead]
OptionOfT 2y ago
WRT CockroachDB Enterprise Free's telemetry requirement: > Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less) Does that mean the cluster will stop working when it can no longer report?
- anticensor 2y ago
  I understood it as "it pings the HQ once a week".
timenova 2y ago
I'm guessing the Required Telemetry thing is gonna cause a technical/security problem too. Most production databases would be running in private isolated networks with no inbound or outbound internet access on the VMs, and because of this requirement, they'll have to open outbound access to at least Cockroach's IPs.
djaouen 2y ago
Thank God I stuck with Postgres lol
rnavi 2y ago
Amidst the frequent noise - its hard to notice that even the most stringent of OSS licenses like AGPL was written way back in 2002! Cloud was not even in the picture. Since then, ever growing cloud players have been playing the 'state' role and misusing OSS as 'religion' heavily affecting infra OSS products or companies.
th3w3bmast3r 2y ago
Yup - another "Contact Us" for pricing. God forbid if your business grows more than 10 Million ARR and now you owe them undisclosed amount of money.
- _xiaz 2y ago
  At this point I'm convinced "Contact Us" is worse for business/sales than just disclosing any outrageous fees upfront
  - th3w3bmast3r 2y ago
    I am with you! I stop looking when it says contact us for pricing.
redwood 2y ago
I just don't understand why they didn't go with a copyleft license like SSPL; is it because they're worried too many people will self-manage in the Enterprise and not pay them?
486sx33 2y ago
It seems cockroach was aptly named
h_tbob 2y ago
I always use good ol’ MySQL. If anything happens can hop to Maria
WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
It's a surprising and very welcome change. Most will benefit. 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.
- darkstar_16 2y ago
  That is not what the license costs even for relatively small deployments.
- smw 2y ago
  That's _not_ what the enterprise license costs for reasonably large deployments.
vinay_ys 2y ago
This made me wonder about postgres. Is Postgres at risk of being taken over by some corporate? What can we learn from all these free open-source databases that has gone enterprise commercial.
- WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
  That is a valid concern, see what happened with Redis or MySQL. But I think (while valid) it's very unlikely. Postgres can't be "bought". A company would need to start building an own version and make it better than the still existing open source version. Then they would need to convince people to pay for it. Not a good business idea.
- samat 2y ago
  PostgreSQL's global, decentralized community, including companies like PostgreSQL Professional in Russia, makes a corporate takeover unlikely. Even if the name is taken, the community and independent providers would carry on.
indulona 2y ago
If you prefer mysql sql flavour, pingcap has titanium db(tidb) alternative.
hannob 2y ago
I like this part: "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."
- _xiaz 2y ago
  Good on them for not mincing words and being upfront about this
hnarn 2y ago
It's honestly getting tiresome reading about yet another company that rides on the wave of open source for popularity and growth, but only for as long as it suits their own bottom line. Just like every other example, the page is filled to the brim with borderline unparsable marketing speak and, excuse my french, pure bullshit. Here's an example: > 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.
- m463 2y ago
  That's the problem with the term "open source". It is ambiguous and can mean anything from public domain to source available. If you just allow people to look at the source, you can call it "open source" and nobody can really argue. If you did that and called it GPL, things would be different.
  - hnarn 2y ago
    It's certainly not ambiguous, but the reason why companies like CockroachDB and others would like to make it appear so certainly is obvious. Anyone confused can just be referred to "The Open Source Definition"[1] by the OSI. [1]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
    - 2y ago
Aeolun 2y ago
Mandatory telemetry?
emocin 2y ago
I worked with the cockroachdb founders at a previous company. They’re clowns.
valyala 2y ago
VictoriaMetrics CTO here. 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/ https://docs.victoriametrics.com/goals/
- chrsig 2y ago
  I hope you can appreciate that the problem here is that the proposition that you "aren't going to change" is entirely unfalsifiable, reliant on trust, and that the individuals making the proposition are in a position to enforce it ad infinitum. Consider me skeptical.
  - valyala 2y ago
    I tried providing good reasons why changing the license from truly open source to some source-available license has little sense from business perspective. Of course, something may change in the future, which could force us reconsider the decision on sticking with Apache2 license. But currently I don't see any reasons to change the license. And I'm sure there will no be such reasons in the next 10 years. 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...
Havoc 2y ago
Are any of the databases certain (as certain as one can be) to stay open?
- nijave 2y ago
  MySQL/Perconna/MariaDB has a pretty community with three different, large entities supporting it. At least there's some redundancy if one decides to change course Postgres also has some separate large entities supporting it but it rolls up to the same codebase
zeeZ 2y ago
The FAQ that asks "What telemetry data will be collected, and how will it be used?" never answers the first half of the question in its marketese blurb. You failed the "ask yourself a question and answer it" part of the exam.

389 points by Cwizard 2y ago

> On November 18, 2024, we will eliminate our Core offering and consolidate on a single, robust CockroachDB Enterprise license That is incredibly short notice.

arccy 2y ago
only a problem if you need to update
- kragen 2y ago
  even then you've had five years notice that enshittification was coming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History
  - cvwright 2y ago
    Making $10M ARR companies pay for the software that they use is not enshittification.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i mean, yes? it is? software you can't use without someone else's permission is obviously shittier than open-source software you can fork, even if you're a big company. perhaps especially if you're a big company. and software that sends telemetry to the vendor is obviously shittier than software that doesn't
      - CyberDildonics 2y ago
        i mean, no? it isn't? changing the license doesn't change the software? the software still works the same way?
        nijave 2y ago
        In this case, they cancelled a product (core) and replaced it with a different product that has an additional new license (enterprise edition with a free tier) So not just a license change
      - redwood 2y ago
        Well if the company can build a business then you can get great software to use... while in theory it would be great if a bunch of incredible software were done purely in the spirit of community open source, in practice that's pretty limited
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - nijave 2y ago
      $10M ARR doesn't mean anything. You could still be a tiny company with terrible financials by selling your product at a loss (a startup) It's just an arbitrary number
- veggieroll 2y ago
  This hasn't been my experience. After another VC-backed software switched licenses, we continued using an older, open source version licensed Apache 2. But that didn't stop their lawyers from trying to shake us down, claiming we were using the latest, enterprise version. We just showed up in their telemetry as using their product and they came a knockin. I imagine that their telemetry failed to distinguish who was running old FOSS from the latest proprietary one. 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.

geenat 2y ago

Overall I feel like this is a step in the right direction. 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

ko_pivot 2y ago
I don’t believe Neon supports multiple write nodes.
- tristan957 2y ago
  It currently does not, but it's something we would like to eventually support. - employee
sho 2y ago
> if you required any enterprise features For me it was the multiple regions. It's like.. with that disabled why are we even here? Data residency is the whole point...
madduci 2y ago
The only thing I don't like is the mandatory telemetry.
- ezekg 2y ago
  I don't like the fact that even free users need an annual license key.
Thaxll 2y ago
Most of those solutions are not on part with Cockroach, Cockroach is basically Spanner usable outside of Google. So global transaction with cluster world wide.

tvink 2y ago

Free license: > Telemetry Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less) So not free, then. Is there already a popular fork?

sigmonsays 2y ago
This is really painful, I don't want this pattern of data collection being common, Telemetry included.
kragen 2y ago
it hasn't been open-source since 02019 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History so if there are popular forks they'd have to be five years old
- cvwright 2y ago
  BSL code automatically converts to open source at a specified date. So probably several releases since then are now as open source as anything else in the world. And if not, then they will be soon - BSL allows a maximum 5 year delay.
  - kragen 2y ago
    that may be (i haven't read the license) but i'm not persuaded it's relevant if nobody forked it five years ago, they probably aren't going to fork it now if somebody did fork it five years ago, they probably aren't going to try to merge in new source code drops as they convert to open source
    - cvwright 2y ago
      Then why do you care? If nobody is going to fork it anyway, what’s the benefit of being open source from the beginning?
      - kragen 2y ago

PaywallBuster 2y ago

at least should still cover a lot of businesses under the free tier > Individuals and businesses, under $10M in annual revenue, can use CockroachDB Enterprise for free

mrweasel 2y ago
You just can't build anything new based on CockroachDB now, because the pricing for self-hosted is "Contact us". So if you build a product you'd need to contact them first and kinda guess how successful you'll be. Maybe it's fine and the license cost isn't a big deal, or it will completely ruin your business case. 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tschellenbach 2y ago

We will probably end up removing CockroachDB from our infra due to this change. It also makes me a bit worried about their long term viability. How much ARR does CockroachDB have and what was their last round valuation...?

Cwizard 2y ago
What will you switch to? I feel like there isn’t a good alternative.
- shadow28 2y ago
  YugabyteDB is a commonly used alternative.
  - jen20 2y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Yugabyte (the company) has taken 290 million dollars of VC money. It's probably a safe assumption that they will follow the same path soon enough.
    - spiffytech 2y ago
      While the future is unwritten, FWIW in 2019 Yugabyte moved to Apache 2.0, open-sourcing features that were previously paywalled. They wrote up their rationale here: https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/why-we-changed-yugabyte-db-licensing-to-100-open-source/ https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/why-we-changed-yugabyte-db-lic...
      - redwood 2y ago
        How's their business growing compared to Cockroach?
      - riku_iki 2y ago
        This won't prevent them back to paywall in future if investors ask.

sho 2y ago

Probably a good move. I'd looked at Cockroach before for a project - they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless, while Enterprise was some absolutely insane figure for a cash-strapped startup. While it was possible to hotfix the code to get around their restrictions - we eventually just used something else. 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.

Cwizard 2y ago
What did you use instead?
- sho 2y ago
  It was a data domiciling project so just went with sharding in good old postgres. Cockroach would have been perfect but it was going to cost something like $5k/m just to turn it on..
geenat 2y ago
The enterprise per core is still an insane figure, based on last time I interacted with sales- would be amazing if this was revised, too, to be more competitive with Planetscale, etc. Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.
- dathinab 2y ago
  through cash strapped startups can now use the "free" enterprise version until they reach 10M$ annual revenue 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).
  - brianwawok 2y ago

Icathian 2y ago

So the obvious question is, which big shops were using the Core version that ended up prompting this change? I know of one or two but I'm curious if there are some obvious big fish.

turtle_heck 2y ago
Weren't Oxide using CockroachDB?
- nindalf 2y ago
  Seems like. There are 5.2k hits in their codebase for "cockroach" (https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Aoxidecomputer+cockroach&type=code https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Aoxidecomputer+cockroach&...)
  - ccmcarey 2y ago
    Looks like those hits are because they forked it https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cockroach https://github.com/oxidecomputer/cockroach (no changes since then though)
- wave-trample-0h 2y ago
  Doesn't this only affect companies with more than $10M in revenue? This change should only affect companies that are a going concern and are apt to remain in business.
- bcantrill 2y ago
  Yes, we are -- and it's worked well for us! (The most acute issue we hit was actually a gnarly OS issue[0][1].) That said, we are not currently a Cockroach Labs customer and we will not be becoming one for purposes of licensing CockroachDB. We are abiding by the terms of the BSL, and the version that we are on (22.1) will be Apache licensed in May 2025; by that point, we will maintain our own Apache-licensed fork for purposes of being the database for the control plane included in the Oxide rack. 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 https://www.illumos.org/issues/15254 [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/a-debugging-odyssey https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/a-debugging... [2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001

ko_pivot 2y ago

As much as this has the vibes of a classic OSS rug pull, as a Cockroach user, I don’t really take it that way. First of all, it was already not open source and secondly, the free to use version was missing key features like follower reads and incremental backups.

api 2y ago
Someone creating free software and changing the license on software they created isn't a "rug pull" in any sense of the word. You paid $0 and contributed nothing. What rug is being pulled? 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.
- theamk 2y ago
  CockroachDB raised >$500M in funding, and a big reason for this was it's high number of users. That high number would be a lot lower if it wasn't a free software.
- warvariuc 2y ago
  > You paid $0 and contributed nothing I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".
  - ted_dunning 2y ago
    From the standpoint of the people paying the developers of said software, it is exactly like paying $0.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      No, it's not. If they're planning a rug pull, they very much care that you took effort to integrate their free offering into your infrastructure, because they care that you're sitting firmly on the rug before they can pull it.

scblock 2y ago

Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". "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.

dymk 2y ago
> Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. Because they get to use it for free?
dastbe 2y ago
> Why would anyone contribute to a commercial product unless they're getting paid to do so. 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ezekg 2y ago
> Dancing around the "so it's not open source" by not clearly saying "correct, it's no longer open source". CockroachDB hasn't been open source for over 5 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...
- scblock 2y ago
  Yet it's one of the top questions on their announcement page and they won't clearly answer it.

AYBABTME 2y ago

I understand the goal, and the perceived abuse of the Core edition. But the problem with the Enterprise edition is that it's quite expensive, "contact us" salesy, and it 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. 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-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ROFISH 2y ago
Agreed. I talked with them in the past and the pricing was far too expensive to make it worth it. As always: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
- immibis 2y ago
  Sometimes quotes are affordable for small businesses - no harm in asking.
candiddevmike 2y ago
There is no abuse here. They released software under a specific license (BSL at that, plenty of opportunities to restrict).

xnx 2y ago

What are the remaining use cases for CockroachDB where there isn't a better/open-source alternative?

Cwizard 2y ago
multi-master writes with serializable transactions
- sroussey 2y ago
  FoundationDB
  - geenat 2y ago
    AFAIK more of a document store unless you use mvsqlite The architecture is ingenious, though.
  - Cwizard 2y ago
    Does not have a SQL API (or something similar). The record layer is interesting but requires your application to be build in Java.
c4pt0r 2y ago
TiDB

_joel 2y ago

Enforced telemetry for free users? That's gross.

red_admiral 2y ago
Not only that, but according to the licence agreement, there are "technical countermeasures" to stop you from using the product if you were to block telemetry with a firewall (presumably it stops working if the telemetry server doesn't send back an acknowledgement), and "You understand and agree that Licensor may use and disclose personal information collected as part of Telemetry in accordance with Licensor's Privacy Policy" ... wait, what?
- michaelt 2y ago
  In the closed source world it's common enough that free trials will be something along the lines of "we give you a license key tied to your name, and every time you start the software it calls into our license server to validate the license key" It's bad, but it's not unusual if you use closed-source software.
  - ezekg 2y ago
    Sure, but I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use a signed license file with a start- and stop-date in this case. Lots of companies, especially enterprises, run air-gaps and telemetry just won't work there. And they should know that... it's their target market after all...
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    I guess this is fine for a free _trial_, if you can host it in some separate firewalled-off subnet where it doesn't touch your real customer data. The issue here is that if you're an org with less than $10M turnover, you're currently on the Core plan and don't want to negotiate the full "Enterprise" licence (which is presumably priced towards larger users than you anyway), then you can't use the thing at all anymore unless you agree to telemetry and some vague disclosure of personal data thing that will get your lawyers in a spin (especially if you serve states in which GDPR applies). EDIT: oh, and PCI-DSS requirements if you want to take credit cards? That's going to be fun.

dzonga 2y ago

predictable and pretty good business move. 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

ensignavenger 2y ago
Whats your appetite for a SaaS vendor unpredictably and without enough warning changing the price they are charging you, or pushing updates to the SaaS that break your business? Better get it put into the contract.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  Their target customers for self-hosting are Enterprises with a capital E who are used to signing multi-year software contracts.
  - ensignavenger 2y ago
    I don't know much about CockroachDB's business, so I was just speaking in general about SaaS products and licensing non-open source software.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

You need an enterprise that's already decided to use CockroachDB if your trial offer is only 30 days long. We've barely walked around the car & kicked the tires before that trial runs out; it's not respectful of the time it takes enterprises to move at all.

999900000999 2y ago

I'm trying to figure out how this is better than Postgress ? 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.

red_admiral 2y ago
CockroachDB is basically "run postgres on a cluster with more fault tolerance" - you can have machines (or entire datacenters) going down, netsplits etc. and as long as there's enough infra up to keep going, it will. Presumably only a small subset of postgres users really need this feature - and those that do, are big enough to need an enterprise licence.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  I'll admit I haven't worked directly in this space in a good while, but the whole mystery terms really rubs me the wrong way . 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.
zellyn 2y ago
For most databases (like Postgres), you typically run a single database (per shard, possibly), and replicate changes to a live read-only backup as fast as possible. If the live R/W database fails, you quickly switch the backup to R/W, and point traffic there instead. 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.

PeterZaitsev 2y ago

Finally all Open Source pretense is dropped. CockroachDB becomes Enterprise+Cloud database company with a free tier, not dissimilar from Oracle. 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.

bonzini 2y ago
Props for calling it source available and not hiding behind "you can't police the meaning of open source", though.
- jpgvm 2y ago
  I actually think source available software is great. Not every piece of software can survive as OSS but source available eliminates most the downsides of closed-source software from a technical perspective. 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.
  - arlcode 2y ago
    I certainly agree. And it makes sense (for Enterprise "tech stack" software). A license violator would just crack your software anyway and legitimate paying users pay for it and want less hassle. You probably will save on some support calls if their engineers can take a quick look themselves. Same goes for any "secret Sauce" in the Code. Most Software of that Type isn't algorithmically novel enough to warrant drm and obfuscation. And again a serious criminal comoetitor would spend the money to reverse it

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I am a great fan of scaling vertically as far sa possible on DB servers. These days that is pretty damn high. It avoids a lot of prickly edge cases. 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

ted_dunning 2y ago
It doesn't solve for required multi-region data storage. Nor for data center failure resilience. Scaling up is fine for a few things, but hopeless for many others.
- JackSlateur 2y ago
  For data-center failure, it does: the underlying storage can be resilient. For multi-region, indeed, that will not be possible. Master-slave would be the way.

kelsey98765431 2y ago

Another database fails to be better and ends up worse. This is why we use DAL agnosticism.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

I've never seen this database used by anyone in real life.

traderj0e 2y ago
I'm skeptical of this kind of multi-master horizontal DBMS to begin with. Never used Cockroach but have used Spanner, and even besides the $, you pay with complexity, slowness, and limitations. Even the in-betweens like Citus have their issues. As far as I can tell, the world runs on traditional DBMSes like Postgres, maybe with HA. If you're big, you run multiple and shard at the application level. I don't think there's a better option yet. 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.
dilyevsky 2y ago
Is Netflix[0] real life enough? [0] - https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/netflix-at-cockroachdb/
- redwood 2y ago
  That's impressive. I'm genuinely surprised they have users at this scale. Are there others?
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    I heard that doordash ran a cluster serving >1M qps, there maybe still a setup at square/block where the team originated from
    - redwood 2y ago
      I guess most of the larger deployments are self-managed rather than their SaaS offering... Do you think this is mostly running on top of hyperscaler infrastructure? Or in traditional enterprise data centers? I'm just surprised because I never see it

ezekg 2y ago

I posted it on Twitter, but I feel like revenue-based licensing models unnecessarily push the compliance burden onto the user. It's an honor system, and even they admit it [0]; even Unity, who also uses a revenue-based model, admits it [1]. I'd prefer licensing models that are able to automatically segment users into customers at the software-level, such as a feature-based or usage-based model. For example, they could segment on CPU count or disk size, requiring an Enterprise offering for databases or clusters over a certain threshold. 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-its-licensing-to-force-bigger-companies-to-pay/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/cockroach-labs-shakes-up-i... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_unity_know_how_much_you_earn/dvbc1fz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/82mfwh/how_could_u... [2]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announcement/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enterprise-license-announ... [3]: https://opensource.org/dosp https://opensource.org/dosp

Eumenes 2y ago

They're following the Mongo playbook

joeblubaugh 2y ago

> Even by conservative estimates, the vast majority of the world’s businesses will meet the eligibility requirements for the Enterprise Free Tier license 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?

Nathanba 2y ago
if it were really the case that the vast majority of businesses doesn't need to pay then they'll just adjust it down to 1 million in revenue

rmoriz 2y ago

How to comply with telemetry in air-gapped environments?

sroussey 2y ago
You don’t. I assume the free version is not licensed for that use case. :/

jappgar 2y ago

"Open-source" in 2024 is a synonym for "ransomware." 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.

max-privatevoid 2y ago
This is why you should look for software that calls itself "FOSS" or "Free Software" instead. Avoid CLAs at all costs as well. If the software is licensed under a GPL-like license without a CLA and has had significant contributions from multiple people, this relicensing rugpull is nearly impossible.

simonebrunozzi 2y ago

I spotted this company in their seed stage and wanted to invest. The founders asked us to provide names for reference checks, etc - a bit unusual, but we were almost done with the commitment, so why not? 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.

Thoreandan 2y ago

> Does this mean that 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. The word you're looking for is "yes".

JonChesterfield 2y ago
I'm just so shocked that VC is following the open source for a while then fuck you business playbook. If only there was prior art to warn people that this was a risk, like all the other VC backed software projects.
ezekg 2y ago
I said it somewhere else, but this FAQ is likely because most people think "source available on GitHub" = "open source", so they're just answering the low-hanging-fruit even if the question is technically incorrect. Not everybody is aware of the differences between "on GitHub" vs OSS, the OSI, the FSF, etc.
drdaeman 2y ago
Coming next decade: companies marketing their product as "open source" because they have an empty GitHub repo for issues.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Or a repository with some source code under a free license, and then some .so and executables in a subdirectory. I'm looking at you Sciter.
croes 2y ago
It's always obvious when they need multiple sentences to answer a simple yes or no question.
lolinder 2y ago
It was already not open source, hence the weasel language. "It will remain source available" is the second-most straightforward way to say "it already wasn't, but it's awkward to admit that given that we allowed you to misunderstand the license for five years". Discussion from five years ago: Relicensing CockroachDB June 4, 2019 (487 points, 282 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097077 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.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...

JonChesterfield 2y ago

Ensure your data is secure with our mandatory telemetry. No deal.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

That's another company that feels like they don't want to be an OSS company after all. After Elastic, I pay more attention to contributor agreements. Basically I consider any project that requires transfer of copyright for OSS contributions as likely to change their license at some point. It's fine; I'm not against that sort of thing and I sometimes pay for software. But I like to know what I'm getting into before and I don't appreciate the bait and switch. It also guides decisions as to what I contribute to actively. 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.

mplanchard 2y ago
tbf I think both GNU and Linux require copyright assignment, and I don't think that either of those are likely to swap licenses any time soon
- orra 2y ago
  FYI, you're right about GNU (by and large), but mistaken about Linux.
  - ddtaylor 2y ago
    GNU has contributor agreements?

tbarbugli 2y ago

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/graphs/contributors https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/graphs/contributors

tristor 2y ago

I like the technology here, but at the same time I feel like they've been on this trajectory since the beginning. It's just another VC-backed company using open source for marketing, without any legitimate desire to actually be open source. At least now they've pulled the wool off of it.

osigurdson 2y ago

I think the reality is, only exceeding common codebases (Linux and Postgres for example), can survive with an open source model. If the value created by the product is 1M times greater than the costs, fine, a way to support it will materialize. Otherwise, economics take over and people need to get paid. The fact that source is publicly available is largely irrelevant.

tsimionescu 2y ago
I don't think the point is how common it is, it's about a organizational model. 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.

alexvitkov 2y ago

I'm not even going to read this, we all know what it is and we all know it's just the first step in a long series of very shitty changes, expect all new development to be in the "contact us" tier. 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.

Yasuraka 2y ago
This actually moves stuff out of the "contact us" tier, where it used to be, and makes everything available to all. There are new hooks, but paywalling capabilities was not the point here.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  New hooks like disabling my database if the telemetry API call fails?
- ezekg 2y ago
  Per their announcement, it sounds like a free user will have to get an annual Enterprise Free license key to use it. I'd hope that'd be automated, but could also be a "contact us" tier to audit revenue. Time will tell.
zachmu 2y ago
Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks. 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.
- vdfs 2y ago
  Without marketing bs, what's something that can be done only with Cockroach and not postgres or other truly-OSS alternatives? I'm curios because I've been reading news about it forever but never had the chance to work with it

pianoben 2y ago

Wow, what a rug-pull! Good luck to Cockroach Labs, but I doubt their product is entrenched-enough to make this strategy sustainable - it's going to _kill_ growth.

mehulashah 2y ago

It seems a shame that to grow, companies are backing away from the vector that got them there: open source. 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.

GiorgioG 2y ago

Yeah no thanks, I'll stick with Postgres

dilyevsky 2y ago

Anyone here migrated to TiDB from cockroach and can share experience? Asking for a friend…

geenat 2y ago
It's a lot more moving parts unfortunately and the TiDB team has historically little interest in fixing that.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Single binary is for sure preferable but given that they have k8s operator shouldn't be too bad? CRDB also had its faults - their CDC to kafka had terrible reliability even on enterprise versions.
- c4pt0r 2y ago
  TiDB CTO here, I think that a clear boundary between components is beneficial for the maintainability of a distributed systems like TiDB, and automated deployment tools like `tiup`(https://tiup.io https://tiup.io) and the Operator of Kubernetes shield end-users from this complexity in order to maintain best practices in deployment. While still providing enough debugging details for advanced users.
  - misiek08 2y ago
    That’s one of worst part of TiDB to be honest. Single boundary with simple flag listing peers (or DNS SRV address) would bring you a lot of smaller companies and/or hobbyists who will contribute. Having different parts written in different languages is awful too, because it brings some micro improvements (if any) but makes project look complex and scary for many new-comers :(

kimungdotcom 2y ago

[dead]

steeeeeve 2y ago

I'm really not a big fan of holding backups and DR behind licensing. That's base level functionality. That and row level security, but at least with row level, I get that there has been a lot of time and energy expended on that feature. Cluster optimization, and enhanced security sure. And responsive support, absolutely.

paxys 2y ago
The ability to turn off telemetry collection is missing from the free version as well. No thanks.
FireBeyond 2y ago
It's the same with SSO, and I think it hurts some companies more than it helps. SSO too often is an arbitrary selection for "Enterprise/$Call Us". 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 $$$.

paxys 2y ago

I get wanting large companies and cloud providers to pay, but mandatory telemetry collection in the self-hosted version of the product is an absolute non starter.

purpleblue 2y ago

I guess I don't get it. CockroachDB is decidedly an enterprise product. There's no need for even a medium sized company to require distributed database the likes of CockroachDB. If you're a small company using it, you're just using it for fun, and you're probably not paying. 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.

smw 2y ago
There are quite a few situations where running the (previously) open source core was a good fit for business problems which would become unprofitable if the enterprise license was used.

victorbjorklund 2y ago

another open source project has died. At least we will always have Postgres.

znpy 2y ago

Friendly reminder that if you contributed code but signed a contribution agreement (which assigns copyright on the code contribution to cockroachlabs) you’ve got nothing to complain about. Never sign contributions agreement: it will be used against you when the license inevitably get changed.

somastoma 2y ago

[dead]

OptionOfT 2y ago

WRT CockroachDB Enterprise Free's telemetry requirement: > Required (excluding ephemeral clusters of 7 days or less) Does that mean the cluster will stop working when it can no longer report?

anticensor 2y ago
I understood it as "it pings the HQ once a week".

timenova 2y ago

I'm guessing the Required Telemetry thing is gonna cause a technical/security problem too. Most production databases would be running in private isolated networks with no inbound or outbound internet access on the VMs, and because of this requirement, they'll have to open outbound access to at least Cockroach's IPs.

djaouen 2y ago

Thank God I stuck with Postgres lol

rnavi 2y ago

Amidst the frequent noise - its hard to notice that even the most stringent of OSS licenses like AGPL was written way back in 2002! Cloud was not even in the picture. Since then, ever growing cloud players have been playing the 'state' role and misusing OSS as 'religion' heavily affecting infra OSS products or companies.

th3w3bmast3r 2y ago

Yup - another "Contact Us" for pricing. God forbid if your business grows more than 10 Million ARR and now you owe them undisclosed amount of money.

_xiaz 2y ago
At this point I'm convinced "Contact Us" is worse for business/sales than just disclosing any outrageous fees upfront
- th3w3bmast3r 2y ago
  I am with you! I stop looking when it says contact us for pricing.

redwood 2y ago

I just don't understand why they didn't go with a copyleft license like SSPL; is it because they're worried too many people will self-manage in the Enterprise and not pay them?

486sx33 2y ago

It seems cockroach was aptly named

h_tbob 2y ago

I always use good ol’ MySQL. If anything happens can hop to Maria

WuxiFingerHold 2y ago

It's a surprising and very welcome change. Most will benefit. 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.

darkstar_16 2y ago
That is not what the license costs even for relatively small deployments.
smw 2y ago
That's _not_ what the enterprise license costs for reasonably large deployments.

vinay_ys 2y ago

This made me wonder about postgres. Is Postgres at risk of being taken over by some corporate? What can we learn from all these free open-source databases that has gone enterprise commercial.

WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
That is a valid concern, see what happened with Redis or MySQL. But I think (while valid) it's very unlikely. Postgres can't be "bought". A company would need to start building an own version and make it better than the still existing open source version. Then they would need to convince people to pay for it. Not a good business idea.
samat 2y ago
PostgreSQL's global, decentralized community, including companies like PostgreSQL Professional in Russia, makes a corporate takeover unlikely. Even if the name is taken, the community and independent providers would carry on.

indulona 2y ago

If you prefer mysql sql flavour, pingcap has titanium db(tidb) alternative.

hannob 2y ago

I like this part: "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."

_xiaz 2y ago
Good on them for not mincing words and being upfront about this

hnarn 2y ago

It's honestly getting tiresome reading about yet another company that rides on the wave of open source for popularity and growth, but only for as long as it suits their own bottom line. Just like every other example, the page is filled to the brim with borderline unparsable marketing speak and, excuse my french, pure bullshit. Here's an example: > 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.

m463 2y ago
That's the problem with the term "open source". It is ambiguous and can mean anything from public domain to source available. If you just allow people to look at the source, you can call it "open source" and nobody can really argue. If you did that and called it GPL, things would be different.
- hnarn 2y ago
  It's certainly not ambiguous, but the reason why companies like CockroachDB and others would like to make it appear so certainly is obvious. Anyone confused can just be referred to "The Open Source Definition"[1] by the OSI. [1]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
  - 2y ago

Aeolun 2y ago

Mandatory telemetry?

emocin 2y ago

I worked with the cockroachdb founders at a previous company. They’re clowns.

valyala 2y ago

VictoriaMetrics CTO here. 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/ https://docs.victoriametrics.com/goals/

chrsig 2y ago
I hope you can appreciate that the problem here is that the proposition that you "aren't going to change" is entirely unfalsifiable, reliant on trust, and that the individuals making the proposition are in a position to enforce it ad infinitum. Consider me skeptical.
- valyala 2y ago
  I tried providing good reasons why changing the license from truly open source to some source-available license has little sense from business perspective. Of course, something may change in the future, which could force us reconsider the decision on sticking with Apache2 license. But currently I don't see any reasons to change the license. And I'm sure there will no be such reasons in the next 10 years. 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...

Havoc 2y ago

Are any of the databases certain (as certain as one can be) to stay open?

nijave 2y ago
MySQL/Perconna/MariaDB has a pretty community with three different, large entities supporting it. At least there's some redundancy if one decides to change course Postgres also has some separate large entities supporting it but it rolls up to the same codebase

zeeZ 2y ago

The FAQ that asks "What telemetry data will be collected, and how will it be used?" never answers the first half of the question in its marketese blurb. You failed the "ask yourself a question and answer it" part of the exam.