Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, has announced a change in its licensing model. The company will now consolidate its self-hosted product under a single enterprise license, requiring customers with more than $10 million in annual revenue to pay based on the number of CPUs or CPU cores in the server system where the database is deployed. Startups below this revenue threshold will still be able to use the enterprise version for free, with the hope that they will eventually reach a point where they need to pay for premium features.
This move is part of a broader trend in the enterprise software industry, where companies are reevaluating their licensing strategies to strike a balance between open source and proprietary models. Cockroach Labs, in particular, is trying to find the right balance between providing a better product to smaller customers and ensuring a fair exchange of value with larger companies.
Cockroach Labs is no stranger to licensing changes. In 2019, the company transitioned away from an open source Apache 2.0 license to protect its own efforts to sell services based on CockroachDB. This decision was driven by the increasing trend of major cloud providers selling their own managed versions of open source projects, bypassing the core developers. By switching to a “source available” license, Cockroach Labs aims to maintain some of the freedoms of open source while preventing the sale of a commercial version of the product “as-a-service” without a license.
The licensing change will take effect on November 18 with the launch of CockroachDB version 24.3. The new enterprise tier will have a single license called the CockroachDB Software License. Startups will have access to all the enterprise features for free, while larger companies will need to pay for the features they require.
Despite these licensing changes, open source is far from dead. Many software components still rely on open source, including CockroachDB itself. Additionally, companies like Spotify are monetizing their own open source efforts. However, when it comes to fully-fledged commercial projects, building a service around the product tends to lead to closed-source models to protect intellectual property.
In conclusion, Cockroach Labs’ licensing change reflects the ongoing tension between open source and proprietary models in the enterprise software space. By consolidating its self-hosted product under a single license, the company hopes to strike a balance between providing value to smaller customers and generating revenue from larger businesses. While open source is still thriving in many areas, the trend towards building services around finished products often results in closed-source models to protect business interests.