There’s a comment on hackernews that should be answered.
I’m surprised everyone is saying it’s clear, because I think it’s sort of vague, so maybe someone can talk me out of it.
If I build a service that lets customers define object types by dragging form widgets, and I turn that into a CRUD app backed by CockroachDB, and they just get to pick a CSS template and occasionally get Excel dumps, are they controlling the schema? They don’t write any SQL, they certainly don’t ever type or see the words CREATE TABLE, but internally I create a table for each of their types with a schema generated from their input, does that count?
Someone else asked about hiring a sysadmin consulting service. If I go to them and say, “Hey, my consulting firm will install and maintain your production servers, pay us $N/hour for routine changes and $kN/hour to page us,” but they have their own developers who write code and can cobble together dev infra if needed, can they choose to use CockroachDB? In my reading of the license, they have the right to make it available to us as their contractor, but we don’t have the right to download and install it and make it available to them for them (or us!) to run their CREATE TABLE statements on.
(I appreciate that edge cases are hard, and that while “just leave it open source” provides easy answers to these questions, it obviously brings other difficulties that you care about avoiding!)
Here’s another one: if I run some website that’s backed by Cockroach and has its own source code available publicly for pull requests (think Reddit until a few years ago, etc.), and one of my customer sends me a pull request that changes a schema in order to implement a feature they care about, does that count?