Developers of the distributed DBMS CockroachDB about the translation of the source texts of the project to a bunch 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 three years ago MySQL co-founders as an alternative to the Open Core model. The essence of BSL is that the code of extended functionality is initially available for modification, but for some period of time it can be used free of charge only subject to additional conditions, which require the purchase of a commercial license to bypass.
The new license allows CockroachDB to be used on any number of nodes in the cluster and embedded in applications, including those sold to customers or running as services. The only restriction that does not allow the license to be considered free and open is the prohibition on the sale of commercial versions of CockroachDB, made in the form of cloud services. Exposing CockroachDB as a paid cloud service now requires the purchase of a commercial license.
Previously published code licensed under Apache 2.0 and available for forking. In addition, after three years from release, the code will be removed from the BSL and distributed under the regular Apache 2.0 license. For example, the release expected in October
CockroachDB 19.2 will be shipped under a BSL license until October 2022, and then automatically relicensed under an Apache 2.0 license. According to the developers, such a time shift will allow the development of a competing product for DBaaS (DBMS as a service) applications, while guaranteeing the openness of the main source code and not moving to the Open Core model.
As in the case of relicensing , ΠΈ the reason for switching to a proprietary license is to combat the parasitization of cloud service providers who create derivative commercial products and resell open source DBMS as cloud services, but do not participate in community life and do not help development. A situation is created when cloud providers who are not connected with the project, reselling ready-made open solutions, benefit, and the developers themselves are left with nothing.
Recall that CockroachDB for the creation of highly reliable geographically distributed and horizontally scalable storage, characterized by high survivability and not dependent on failures of disks, nodes and data centers. At the same time, CockroachDB guarantees the integrity of ACID transactions, provides the ability to use SQL for data manipulation, allows you to make changes to the storage schema on the fly, supports indexes and foreign keys, supports automatic replication and storage rebalancing.
Source: opennet.ru