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Comment by Thoreandan | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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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

The blog post is a 404, here's the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190604173131/https://www.cockr...

Coming next decade: companies marketing their product as "open source" because they have an empty GitHub repo for issues.

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.

It's always obvious when they need multiple sentences to answer a simple yes or no question.

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.

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.

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