Can you please not post in the flamewar style here? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks.

If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money on useful software.

Without marketing bs, what's something that can be done only with Cockroach and not postgres or other truly-OSS alternatives? I'm curios because I've been reading news about it forever but never had the chance to work with it

Think of it as a replacement for spanner with a postgres frontend. It's about global availability and replication without application-level sharding.

Transactional workloads over datasets in the single digit petabytes.

Maybe not cool, but you can, in fact, be both too big and too geographically distributed for Postgres.

This actually moves stuff out of the "contact us" tier, where it used to be, and makes everything available to all.

There are new hooks, but paywalling capabilities was not the point here.

New hooks like disabling my database if the telemetry API call fails?

Per their announcement, it sounds like a free user will have to get an annual Enterprise Free license key to use it.

I'd hope that'd be automated, but could also be a "contact us" tier to audit revenue. Time will tell.