While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc).
For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.
Cockroach Labs is not your only option; you can also use other providers that have a license agreement with us. Our first partner in this area is ObjectRocket: https://www.objectrocket.com/blog/cockroachdb/introducing_co...
Financially, we pay AWS for EC2 instances and other expenses + them on top of that for consulting service, they have root access to the cluster. We do not have any devops/infra guy in the office.
Would they be allowed to install (and manage) CockroachDB on our cluster if we need to ?
Their new license doesn't forbid others from offering a managed service. It simply requires the managed provider to pay them for a license. AWS, GCP, etc can still create a managed service.
I don't think this is the case, a third party can provide hosted CockroachDB provided they license it from Cockroach Labs.
>"The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license."
Again, IANAL.
Right now their sales chat can't say how much that would cost.
It seem an alternative could be to provide something like a cPanel-like thing that would enable other companies to easily offer CockroachDB DBaaS solutions. That's adding value rather than subtracting.