Simon Willison’s Weblog

Whither CockroachDB? (via) CockroachDB - previously Apache 2.0, then BSL 1.1 - announced on Wednesday that they were moving to a source-available license.

Oxide use CockroachDB for their product's control plane database. That software is shipped to end customers in an Oxide rack, and it's unacceptable to Oxide for their customers to think about the CockroachDB license.

Oxide use RFDs - Requests for Discussion - internally, and occasionally publish them (see rfd1) using their own custom software.

They chose to publish this RFD that they wrote in response to the CockroachDB license change, describing in detail the situation they are facing and the options they considered.

Since CockroachDB is a critical component in their stack which they have already patched in the past, they're opting to maintain their own fork of a recent Apache 2.0 licensed version:

The immediate plan is to self-support on CochroachDB 22.1 and potentially CockroachDB 22.2; we will not upgrade CockroachDB beyond 22.2. [...] This is not intended to be a community fork (we have no current intent to accept outside contributions); we will make decisions in this repository entirely around our own needs. If a community fork emerges based on CockroachDB 22.x, we will support it (and we will specifically seek to get our patches integrated), but we may or may not adopt it ourselves: we are very risk averse with respect to this database and we want to be careful about outsourcing any risk decisions to any entity outside of Oxide.

The full document is a fascinating read - as Kelsey Hightower said:

This is engineering at its finest and not a single line of code was written.