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Comment by ko_pivot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> You paid $0 and contributed nothing

I think investing into integrating a tool into your infrastructure is not exactly "paying $0".

From the standpoint of the people paying the developers of said software, it is exactly like paying $0.

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.

If you make software and I start using it, I’ve created an obligation for you to keep making it?

I see the issue with these more as if you are paying for it, one of the decision factors to buy it might have been that you have the opportunity to go to an open source version if the relationship gets bad.

Sole source vendors are really risky, so open source gives a little control back to the buyer that the vendor won't lock them in then screw them later (oracle).

So now if you're paying for Cockroach, you're effectively on proprietary technology with no negotiating levers.

It’s Postgres compatible. If you only use standard features your negotiating lever is to bail for another Postgres compatible database. There are tons of managed offerings that are quick to stand up.

This is why standard APIs, protocols, and languages are a more important thing than specific pieces of software. If there is compatibility you have choice.

It is described as a rugpull because of the marketing around it being open source. Coackroach however was never open source, it was BSL licensed. This change does appear to mean that old versions will no longer eventually convert to open source, though.

Thus it would be up to the the BSL promoters and marketers to decide whether or not this is a rugpull. As an open source user and proponent, I don't really care.

> Coackroach however was never open source, it was BSL licensed.

It used to be Apache2. :)

Their blog post announcing this in 2019 happens to now 404:

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach...

My bad, I was wrong then. They even still falsely claim on github that it is open source, too (thanks to another commenter for pointing that out.).

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...

Really does appear to be memory-holed, rather than just having moved. Not a good look. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acockroachlabs.com+"Co...."

Cockroach hasn’t marketed itself as open source for years

> CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

They seem to have fixed it.

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.

The rug where my contributions sit on. That rug.

And as you're surely aware, competent OSS contribution is worth thousands

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