Developers of the distributed database system CockroachDB on translating the source texts of the project into a combination of Business Source License (BSL) and Cockroach Community License (CCL), which is not free due to discrimination against certain categories of users. The BSL license was introduced three years ago by the co-founders of MySQL as an alternative to the Open Core model. The essence of BSL is that the code for extended functionality is initially available for modification, but may only be used for free under additional conditions for a certain period of time, requiring the purchase of a commercial license to circumvent those conditions.
The new license allows CockroachDB to be used on any number of nodes in a cluster and embedded in applications, including those sold to clients or operated as services. The only limitation that prevents the license from being considered free and open is the prohibition on selling commercial versions of CockroachDB delivered in the form of cloud services. A commercial license is now required to offer CockroachDB as a paid cloud service.
Previously published code under the Apache 2.0 license is available for creating forks. Furthermore, after three years from the release date, the code will be released from the BSL provisions and will be distributed under the standard Apache 2.0 license. For example, the expected release
of CockroachDB 19.2 by October 2022 will be provided under the BSL license, and then it will automatically be re-licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. According to the developers, such a time shift will allow for the development of a competing product for DBaaS (Database as a Service) applications, while ensuring the openness of the core source code and avoiding a shift to the Open Core model.
As with the re-licensing , and The reason for switching to a non-free license is the fight against the exploitation by cloud service providers, who create derivative commercial products and resell open DBMS as cloud services, but do not participate in the community or contribute to development. This creates a situation where unrelated cloud providers gain profits by reselling ready-made open solutions, while the actual developers end up with nothing.
Recall that the DBMS CockroachDB is designed to create highly reliable, geographically distributed, and horizontally scalable storage solutions that feature exceptional resilience and are unaffected by disk, node, and data center failures. At the same time, CockroachDB guarantees ACID transaction integrity, provides the ability to use SQL for data manipulation, allows on-the-fly schema changes, supports indexes and foreign keys, and features automatic replication and rebalancing of storage.
Source: opennet.ru
