3 ms·

I don't think your points are totally wrong. I especially think that your points hold water if you were to feel the need to set out to build your community fork

by vvern 6y ago

I don't think your points are totally wrong. I especially think that your points hold water if you were to feel the need to set out to build your community fork or competing hosted offering in the next couple of years. Secondarily, I think that if your company had the resources to staff developers to build out a whole hosted offering, I can tell you that CRL would love to be a partner and understand what's going wrong. Maybe that's unacceptable for some sort of other reason but it's not obvious to me what that is. Yes the license means that real-time development of the project, on some level, relies on coordinating with its developers, which do, on the whole, work for a company. All this being said, it sounds like you've got a better vision for how projects like this should get funded and built. How should society fund projects like CRDB? I think there's a very wide range of reasonable answers that fall in different parts of the fantasy spectrum. For now, in 2020s American capitalism, the BSD license approach, at least to my tastes (which are hecka biased), feels pretty good.

ensignavenger 6y ago
I appreciate your thoughts. A company doesn't have to have the resources to run a managed service in order to benefit from the guaranteed possibility for such an alternative to exist. I don't need to fork a project to benefit from the guarantee that I can fork it and do whatever I like with it. There is a concept in many open source communities of a "benevolent dictator" project leader. It doesn't matter if the project leader is an individual, or a company. Many open source projects are lead by a single company that dictates how it is ran. The thing that keeps such dictators benevolent is the Freedom To Fork. Without the Freedom To Fork, how do we guarantee benevolence? The current CRL folks could be the nicest, most wonderful people in the world, but there is no guarantee the company won't change hands, the current folks won't retire or move on, or their motivations don't change and they begin to lose their benevolence. Sure, CRL may be interested in partnering and playing nice- now. But they hold the keys to the kingdom, and can lock the door anytime they want to. I simply want the possibility, that if things don't work out, I have options. But you are right- I do have ideals about how projects like this should get funded and built. And you are right, there are a wide range of reasonable answers. I disagree with them being a fantasy though. I think Postgres is a great example! There is a long list of companies that are "significant" contributors to Postgres. https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ This list included consultants, hosting providers (Even the much maligned AWS is a sponsor), and companies that use Postgres. WordPress/Automatic is another successful example, one with a strong business as community leader. They do well with their consulting and hosting business. The Linux Foundation umbrella also has a variety of supporters and manage a lot of open source projects. There are a variety of open source projects that are developed by companies that use them, much of the Apache Foundation projects fall into this category. Another model that works well for many (I'm not a huge fan of this model) is the Open Core model. If as a user I stick to relying only upon the open source editions of projects like GitLab, I get all the benefits of using open source. (This does not prevent me from buying a commercial license from the company to gain support- if they are willing to support my use of their open source edition in an acceptable manner). RedHat is pretty successful at selling support and consulting. Other open source developers do well selling a hosted managed service of their product. There are a lot of different ways to fund open source projects.
- vvern 6y ago
  > There is a long list of companies that are "significant" contributors to Postgres. https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ While I agree that that can work for maintaining existing and valuable projects, I have some doubts that that can work to fund projects getting to that point. Postgres, additionally, grew out of a proprietary commercial enterprise in Ingress and then became usable with a sizable payroll from the University of California (as far as I understand it). I do think that public investment like large grants to fund teams to work on open source software would be a great thing. I think another factor here is the timing and the context of the moment. There is a turning tide in the data systems world whereby just having something you can run isn't good enough because the overhead to figure out the operations just isn't in the budget when there are hosted solutions out there. > Sure, CRL may be interested in partnering and playing nice- now. But they hold the keys to the kingdom, and can lock the door anytime they want to. This is only somewhat true. The BSL license cockroach uses converts all code to Apache after 3 years. While in the short term this likely means that CRL holds the keys, if this investment builds the quality of product we hope and believe it will, that corpus of code will be available for decades to come. I do appreciate the quality product that is postgres, but I can also say that I've built services that have worked quite well on Postgres 9 which was released over 10 years ago. I'm not saying that good stuff hasn't happened, but that if cockroach is able to fund its way to a somewhat finished project that proves its worth in enterprise deployments, it will have to have been successful and valuable for more than 3 years. Open core can be okay. CRL engages in some of that too. It's hard to know where to draw the line. I much prefer a 3 year, permissive BSL to the open core enterprise code. Maybe that's just me. > RedHat is pretty successful at selling support and consulting. Was pretty successful at it. It's an IBM brand now. Also, it grew up and thrived in the era when you needed a lot of investment and expertise to build, run, and manage datacenters. That world is ending. Another thing I'll note is that Postgres is fundamentally simpler than crdb, or at least than cockroach would like to ultimately be. WordPress is way way simpler than both of them. Hundreds of engineer years is a pretty steep cost price to get something to that bar of really being valuable. The opportunity cost landscape for software developers alone has shifted what it might take to make a postgres-scale database happen again: my guess is that if the same calliber programmers from the 90s at Berkeley were tinkering on systems getting paid public university wages today, they'd end up in jobs elsewhere pretty quickly. So yeah, I'd love for it to make sense for everything every company did to be at least big O Open Source, if not even big F Free Software. That'd be a cool world. Imagine the world where everything running Google, Amazon, Microsoft were building blocks we could all learn from and shape to our needs. That'd be sweet. In that world, crdb and crl might not need to exist, and that'd be totally cool too. Note also that Google and Amazon not just have hosted versions of Postgres, they also have adapted them into new products and they make a heck of a lot of money from those products without sharing any of the tech. It's not fair to draw direct comparisons from what has worked to what might work today. A 3 year delay for fully permissive licensing is something that lets me sleep pretty well while still leaving me way way more privileged than sometimes feels reasonable.

by vvern 6y ago

ensignavenger 6y ago

I appreciate your thoughts. A company doesn't have to have the resources to run a managed service in order to benefit from the guaranteed possibility for such an alternative to exist. I don't need to fork a project to benefit from the guarantee that I can fork it and do whatever I like with it. There is a concept in many open source communities of a "benevolent dictator" project leader. It doesn't matter if the project leader is an individual, or a company. Many open source projects are lead by a single company that dictates how it is ran. The thing that keeps such dictators benevolent is the Freedom To Fork. Without the Freedom To Fork, how do we guarantee benevolence? The current CRL folks could be the nicest, most wonderful people in the world, but there is no guarantee the company won't change hands, the current folks won't retire or move on, or their motivations don't change and they begin to lose their benevolence. Sure, CRL may be interested in partnering and playing nice- now. But they hold the keys to the kingdom, and can lock the door anytime they want to. I simply want the possibility, that if things don't work out, I have options. But you are right- I do have ideals about how projects like this should get funded and built. And you are right, there are a wide range of reasonable answers. I disagree with them being a fantasy though. I think Postgres is a great example! There is a long list of companies that are "significant" contributors to Postgres. https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ This list included consultants, hosting providers (Even the much maligned AWS is a sponsor), and companies that use Postgres. WordPress/Automatic is another successful example, one with a strong business as community leader. They do well with their consulting and hosting business. The Linux Foundation umbrella also has a variety of supporters and manage a lot of open source projects. There are a variety of open source projects that are developed by companies that use them, much of the Apache Foundation projects fall into this category. Another model that works well for many (I'm not a huge fan of this model) is the Open Core model. If as a user I stick to relying only upon the open source editions of projects like GitLab, I get all the benefits of using open source. (This does not prevent me from buying a commercial license from the company to gain support- if they are willing to support my use of their open source edition in an acceptable manner). RedHat is pretty successful at selling support and consulting. Other open source developers do well selling a hosted managed service of their product. There are a lot of different ways to fund open source projects.

vvern 6y ago
> There is a long list of companies that are "significant" contributors to Postgres. https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ While I agree that that can work for maintaining existing and valuable projects, I have some doubts that that can work to fund projects getting to that point. Postgres, additionally, grew out of a proprietary commercial enterprise in Ingress and then became usable with a sizable payroll from the University of California (as far as I understand it). I do think that public investment like large grants to fund teams to work on open source software would be a great thing. I think another factor here is the timing and the context of the moment. There is a turning tide in the data systems world whereby just having something you can run isn't good enough because the overhead to figure out the operations just isn't in the budget when there are hosted solutions out there. > Sure, CRL may be interested in partnering and playing nice- now. But they hold the keys to the kingdom, and can lock the door anytime they want to. This is only somewhat true. The BSL license cockroach uses converts all code to Apache after 3 years. While in the short term this likely means that CRL holds the keys, if this investment builds the quality of product we hope and believe it will, that corpus of code will be available for decades to come. I do appreciate the quality product that is postgres, but I can also say that I've built services that have worked quite well on Postgres 9 which was released over 10 years ago. I'm not saying that good stuff hasn't happened, but that if cockroach is able to fund its way to a somewhat finished project that proves its worth in enterprise deployments, it will have to have been successful and valuable for more than 3 years. Open core can be okay. CRL engages in some of that too. It's hard to know where to draw the line. I much prefer a 3 year, permissive BSL to the open core enterprise code. Maybe that's just me. > RedHat is pretty successful at selling support and consulting. Was pretty successful at it. It's an IBM brand now. Also, it grew up and thrived in the era when you needed a lot of investment and expertise to build, run, and manage datacenters. That world is ending. Another thing I'll note is that Postgres is fundamentally simpler than crdb, or at least than cockroach would like to ultimately be. WordPress is way way simpler than both of them. Hundreds of engineer years is a pretty steep cost price to get something to that bar of really being valuable. The opportunity cost landscape for software developers alone has shifted what it might take to make a postgres-scale database happen again: my guess is that if the same calliber programmers from the 90s at Berkeley were tinkering on systems getting paid public university wages today, they'd end up in jobs elsewhere pretty quickly. So yeah, I'd love for it to make sense for everything every company did to be at least big O Open Source, if not even big F Free Software. That'd be a cool world. Imagine the world where everything running Google, Amazon, Microsoft were building blocks we could all learn from and shape to our needs. That'd be sweet. In that world, crdb and crl might not need to exist, and that'd be totally cool too. Note also that Google and Amazon not just have hosted versions of Postgres, they also have adapted them into new products and they make a heck of a lot of money from those products without sharing any of the tech. It's not fair to draw direct comparisons from what has worked to what might work today. A 3 year delay for fully permissive licensing is something that lets me sleep pretty well while still leaving me way way more privileged than sometimes feels reasonable.