Simply because if I'm using CockroachDB and don't want to manage it myself, my only option is Cockroach Labs.
While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc).
For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.
Quick question : my company uses a "devops as a service" partner. Basically we pay a monthly fee to have their guys on call 24/7 in case something starts to go wrong. Additionally they update and manage our kubernetes cluster, installing and setuping any dependency we require. From our point of view, we have a fully managed kubernetes cluster.
Financially, we pay AWS for EC2 instances and other expenses + them on top of that for consulting service, they have root access to the cluster. We do not have any devops/infra guy in the office.
Would they be allowed to install (and manage) CockroachDB on our cluster if we need to ?
I'm not a lawyer or in any way speaking for Cockroach Labs, but the Additional License Grant in their license looks to allow "contractors" to do that kind of thing. It's you or your lawyer's call as to whether you're safe in your scenario, but it seems to me that the answer is yes.
Their new license doesn't forbid others from offering a managed service. It simply requires the managed provider to pay them for a license. AWS, GCP, etc can still create a managed service.
It is a high risk business model to be entirely dependent on negotiating a license with a single vendor that you are competing against.
For MongoDB there are vendors that will keep offering managed MongoDB. I talked with one that is open-sourcing their deployment as required by the MongoDB license. I suspect that no companies will start a new hosted MongoDB offering based on purchasing a commercial license from MongoDB and we already saw the biggest alternative MongoDB provider merge with MongoDB.
Good point. We shall wait and see how that turns out.
Right now their sales chat can't say how much that would cost.
It seem an alternative could be to provide something like a cPanel-like thing that would enable other companies to easily offer CockroachDB DBaaS solutions. That's adding value rather than subtracting.
While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc).
For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.