Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB

But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. The full details of the change are below, but the short version is this:

In order to continue building a strong open source core, this restriction has a rolling time limit: three years after each release, the license converts to the standard Apache 2.0 license. The new license still permits the vast majority of users to use, redistribute, and modify CockroachDB freely, and will become no-strings-attached Open Source after three years.

Source: www.cockroachlabs.com