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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

Opensource is opensource: CockroachDB Core up until Nov 24, 2024 is, and not afterward. Anyone who wants to fork it can do so. Mind you this will be a hard fork as there's no way to keep in sync with their enterprise product.

What you say is true in that you shouldn't view a VC backed opensource offering as 'permanently' opensource by the same group.

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CockroachDB Core has not been offered under an OSI (i.e. Open Source) license since 2019 - everything subsequently has either been under Business Source License or the Cockroach Community License.

I searched github and thought this[0] was it.

> Source code in this repository is variously licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL), the CockroachDB Community License (CCL), the MIT license, BSD-style licenses, and other licenses specified in the source code. Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and the copyright belongs to The Cockroach Authors unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file.

Is the caveat in this part (that I didn't catch before)? "Source code in a given file is licensed under the BSL and ..." That is sucky.

[0] https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach?tab=License-1-ov-fi...

Kind of... Certain extensions such as basic backups are closed source and have never been in the OSS version.

Many things would have to be re-added from scratch in a fork.

I'm having trouble parsing/making sense of this. Was basic backup in Core? If you were running anything more than Core you weren't running an OSS version and had already crossed that line before this announcement. If you were running an OSS version there's nothing to add, just fork, no?

Core only has the "full backup". Incremental and other types are available to enterprise. I run the Core edition (with full backups) for my personal projects.

CockroachDB Core uses 3 licenses: CCL, BSL, Apache

CCL, BSL = "source available"

Apache = open source

Parts of CockroachDB under CCL that do NOT transition to Apache OSS: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/ccl

    > the sub-tree under pkg/ccl is under a different license (CCL) that does not transition to APL2 after a set duration.

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/discussions/127140#...

"Basic" (i.e. full) backups have been included in the OSS version since its November 2020 release (20.2): https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/backup-restore/

They are still pretty limited compared to what's in the enterprise version, but it's not right to say basic backups are closed source and have never been there.

CockroachDB Core uses 3 licenses: CCL, BSL, Apache

CCL, BSL = "source available"

Apache = open source

Parts of CockroachDB under CCL that do NOT transition to Apache OSS: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/ccl

    > the sub-tree under pkg/ccl is under a different license (CCL) that does not transition to APL2 after a set duration.

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/discussions/127140#...

What happens the day where the only way to fork it realistically is to pay people. And I mean good people to even keep up? And what if on top of that the bests in the game are already in the corporations that you want to fork from?

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