Couchbase has announced modifications to the licensing of its Community Edition products, limiting individual cluster sizes to five nodes and designating cross data center replication (XDCR) as a feature exclusive to the Enterprise Edition. This adjustment aims to prevent the over-deployment of unsupported software and affects approximately 5% of clusters using the Community Edition. While these changes restrict the scalability of the Community Edition, the software remains free under the BSL 1.1 license. Users who require larger clusters or XDCR capabilities are encouraged to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition. The announcement has attracted criticism from users, particularly startups, who argue that the new limitations hinder their ability to deploy robust applications and maintain multi-cloud deployments. Couchbase plans to offer free cloud-based options in the future and advises users to attend upcoming conferences for more information.