Cockroach Rescinds Open Core for a Free Enterprise Version

Cockroach Labs is eliminating the free-to-use “open core” stripped-down version of its distributed database, offering in its place the more fully-featured enterprise version.

The company plans the switchover on November 18, with the debut of 24.3 version of CockroachDB.

Cockroach will ask for payment, via an annual contract, only from those businesses with $10 million in annual revenue, and from government agencies. Those that make less than $10 million can use the software gratis, though they will miss out on the enterprise support.

This $10 million threshold will be based on an honor system, according to TechCrunch. So no brutal Oracle-style audits for organizations using the software, the company promised.

Free vs. Paid Versions

Though those not paying for a subscription will miss out on professional support, either of the  enterprise or essential variety. Cockroach will continue to offer community support to the free edition via Documentation, the Cockroach Forum, and Slack.

The free edition will also come with more strings. Namely, Cockroach will monitor any deployments via telemetry (except for “ephemeral” clusters that are stood up for seven days or less). Paid users can opt out of the telemetry program.

It will also come with more features than the legacy Core edition did, offering cluster optimization, backup and streaming capability, and a more robust identity management and security features, according to the company.

The “open core” model confused and frustrated users,  acknowledged company CEO Spencer Kimball, in a blog post explaining the change.

For one, users of Core missed out on using the features in the paid enterprise edition, such as the backup capability.

Secondly, larger organizations that should have been using the enterprise edition were using the free one instead.

“The irony of CockroachDB’s state-of-the-art resilience is that as the product has matured, use cases can increasingly be run in production with minimal operator overhead and support requirements,” Kimball wrote.

This approach makes sense, given the refined nature of the company’s desired user base.

In an interview with TNS in last October, Kimball told how the company slowly came to the understanding that its database — which is specialized for highly-resilient, large-scale, multi-cloud operations — isn’t every developer’s cup of tea.

Instead, the company focused on a much smaller, more more relevant potential user base, targeting those system architects and CTOs who manage global hyperscale systems.

“We’ve actually gotten a lot more focused as a company,” Kimball said at the time. “At the beginning, you want anyone that’s going to use your system to help you understand it and develop it. But as we’ve now gotten to the point where even the big enterprises are using Cockroach, that really helps us focus is who we try to talk to, it’s just exclusively at the high-end market.”

Is Open Source a Dead End?

Originally, CockroachDB was under an open source Apache license, but the company was one of the first in a recent wave to abandon this licensing model, in favor of a more restructure Business Source License (BSL), which allowed users to view, but not modify, the source code.

The move was done deliberately to thwart large cloud companies that use the code to build their own versions to offer as a service, thereby depriving Cockroach of revenue, according to a now-deleted 2019 page on the Cockroach site.

The move mirrored similar actions taken by the keepers of the Elastic search tool a few years prior, and was also mirrored last year by HashiCorp, with its line of infrastructure management tools, and then again this year by fellow data provider Redis.

Announcing these licensing shifts, both companies stressed that the move was necessary to focus on getting paid.

To appease users who weren’t paying for the software,  Cockroach created an open core version of the database system that users could continue to deploy without costs.

Open Core Is No Solution

In theory, the open core approach both addresses the user need for source code, while preserving the vendor’s business value. A basic version of the software and its source code remains open — which is great for testing the software — while the vendor offers a premium version with extra features and support.

But in reality, Cockroach has found that open core creates a chasm between the premium paid version of the software and the sometimes deliberately hobbled free version, leaving users with a negative experience of the product.

Following this announcement, many open source advocates actually praised Cockroach’s new approach, even as it moves even further from the ideals of open source.

“Whatever you may think of CockroachDB’s license change, you must give them kudos for not muddying the open source license waters. They aren’t playing the game of calling something open source when it is demonstrably not,” wrote Jim Jagielski, an open source technologist, on social media service X.

Others remain more circumspect, casting doubt on the use of open source for marketing purposes.

“It’s not really open source if it’s run by a company that will eventually use its position to squeeze its users for cash,” one commenter on Hacker News argued.