12 ms·

Anyone running FDB in production, good luck, downloads are removed from https://foundationdb.com/ https://foundationdb.com/ I don't understand why anyone would

by jasondc 12y ago

Anyone running FDB in production, good luck, downloads are removed from https://foundationdb.com/ https://foundationdb.com/ I don't understand why anyone would run a closed source database, especially with the open source options available.

smt88 12y ago
The acquire-hire-kill cycle for startups that target developers has become really frustrating. I'd love to try a lot of these new products, but it's hard to know if it's worth my time.
- jcdavis 12y ago
  Tragedy of the commons in action. Every VC-backed startup is incentivized to sell, but in the process continues to kill goodwill towards dev startups. I'd be super hesitant of relying on any other company for core tech with high switching cost for this reason.
  - smt88 12y ago
    This doesn't have to be the case. What if startups with high switching costs (DBMS, OS, pretty much anything else infrastructural) added a guarantee to their sales contracts? For example, it could be that, if they get acquired, they'll open-source the technology, sell it to another for-profit entity that will maintain it, or provide a migration tool. Even for something like FoundationDB, it'd hardly be any skin off Apple's back to have a few employees spend a few months ensuring that previous customers have some sort of support.
    - josho 12y ago
      This is simply the risk you take being an early adopter. If you are uncomfortable with the risk then choose something from IBM/oracle/et al.
      - smt88 12y ago
        I do choose established providers. The problem is for the community as a whole -- each company that this happens to is another hit to the credibility of early startups.
      - lambda 12y ago
        Or choose free software. If it's free software, even if the original developer goes away, you can hire someone to keep working on it, or someone else can decide to make a business supporting it, or the like.
        coldtea 12y ago
        Or you just get left with a broken OSS project whose contributors moved on to shinier things, and nobody really much cares about continuing it, and you don't have the knowledge/time/resources to hire someone to do it.
        danieldk 12y ago
        But if the product is already working, chances are that you get away long enough (to do a graceful migration) by just doing small bug fixes, changes to support OS updates, etc. This is what we are now doing for a project with Berkeley DB XML, which hadn't seen updates for five years. When there finally was an update, it was buggy and moved to the Affero GPL 3, which conflicts with other open source licenses used in the project. So, we continue to use the five year old iteration with a small set of patches. (Lesson learned: once a product is owned by Oracle, prepare your evacuation plans.)
        collyw 12y ago
        I was agreeing with the previous posters until I realized this has kind of happened to me. Tastypie was the go-to REST package for Django 3 years ago. Now it has kind of been abandoned and everyone is ranting about Django-REST-Framework. Fortunately it is stable (for my use cases), and it doesn't actually seem ton be that big a deal that it isn't being worked on. Django_REST_framework is a lot nicer though.
    - ef4 12y ago
      It's hard to really guarantee effectively without putting up serious money. The typical large closed-source codebase is full of undocumented things and hidden dependencies on random chunks of proprietary environment. Making it usable as open source is a ton of work. And you can't guarantee that work will happen without putting up some kind of bond or buying insurance, given that the vendor could simply go bankrupt and not honor the contract.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      >What if startups with high switching costs (DBMS, OS, pretty much anything else infrastructural) added a guarantee to their sales contracts? For example, it could be that, if they get acquired, they'll open-source the technology, sell it to another for-profit entity that will maintain it, or provide a migration tool. That would be like them putting a huge paper hat on their head, saying "I'm not a good target for acquisition". Companies buy them so they (also) get their product/IP etc. If those startups have promised to give it away in such a case, then they are not that good of a buy.
      - smt88 12y ago
        Those are just contingencies if the acquirer doesn't want to sell the product anymore. Basically it's a guarantee that, even if they get acquired, their customers won't be punished. That scenario won't hurt companies that are being acquired with the intent of keeping the product running, for obvious reasons. It also shouldn't hurt acqui-hire scenarios. The only time it might hurt is when the acquirer wants to use the technology internally, but not offer it to anyone else. That's fairly rare, and the downside (potentially scaring away that tiny fraction of acquirers) is much smaller than the upside (making potential customers feel safe).
    - Joeri 12y ago
      Even if you get a few months of reliable support, you still have to switch which will cost you dearly. Often what is done is source escrow. The source is given to a third party, and if anything goes wrong the third party releases the source to the one who purchased the product.
      - jon-wood 12y ago
        Even this sounds like a bad outcome for users of the tool. One minute you're building a product, the next you're stuck maintaining a closed source database.
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  Can you (or anyone else) explain why these occur? Is it simply a case of the acquirer wanting the technology and maybe the personnel while the acquired company is losing money hand over fist so they just shut the company down?
  - hkmurakami 12y ago
    It's a question of whether the acquirer and/or the acquiree have a good faith social contract with the early adopters who take the risk and believe in them.
  - smt88 12y ago
    Sometimes it's because the product is on the way to failure in the market. It might be a great product, but that doesn't mean it'll ever be profitable. The acquirer may love the technology and use it internally, but it's expensive to keep it in a public marketplace. It requires support staff, marketing, sales, etc. There are also acquisitions that are purely about customers, so the startup's product is shut down or rolled into the acquirer's existing products. So there are a lot of good reasons you'd want to company other than its product, but we can't always tell which reason it is right away.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    There is no transfer pricing mechanism for programmers like there is for footballers. Worse, programmers are often loyal to a particular technology or concept. So in order to extract the valuable staff from a company it's necessary to destroy that thing so the staff can be reallocated profitably. "Technology" is rarely re-used per se.
    - georgemcbay 12y ago
      "So in order to extract the valuable staff from a company it's necessary to destroy that thing so the staff can be reallocated profitably." I wonder how often this actually works. In most cases where I've seen this (or heard of it happening first hand from people I know) the vast majority of the people you'd want to keep were out the door of the new place pretty close to as soon as possible (meaning, as soon as the contracts allow, or the golden handcuffs are mostly off, or whatever is relevant to the specific situation). On the inside there tends to be a pretty predictable path: New management tells everyone nothing will change materially, everything inevitably changes very quickly, people get disgruntled and take off for other opportunities (at a quickly accelerating pace as the old guard sees all their former colleagues from the old place leaving the new).
- PublicEnemy111 12y ago
  I've been wondering if there's a sort of nash equilibrium to these things. How many startups will a restaurant let auction its open tables before losing faith in all of them?
- bad_user 12y ago
  Here's a simple rule you can apply - if it's closed source, then it's not worth your time. Like, don't build on top of freaking closed source platforms and after 17 years of OSI, 24 years of GPLv2 and myriads of open-source alternatives available, you'd think people would learn.
  - troels 12y ago
    Except of course if there is no oss alternative and you can't conceivably build it on your own. But yeah - Pretty much agree. The fact that most oss products are best-of-class makes the choice even easier.
    - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      If there isn't: a) look at building your own. What's inconceivable to one person may not be to another. b) Build support for at least two closed-source alternatives, and make sure you always have at least two current alternatives.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    "if it's closed source, then it's not worth your time." Of course. Because Gimp does all the thing Photoshop does Blender does all that Maya does I'm sure as well. SCADA systems for industrial control? Just download the first one that shows up on Google. EDA systems? Sure, there's a GPL alternative. People use Mentor (as an example) because they don't know better.
    - Joeri 12y ago
      Startups don't make another photoshop, they make another gimp and hope to grow it into another photoshop over time, or hope to get bought out by a company that makes another photoshop and wants their talent and technology.
    - bad_user 12y ago
      > Gimp does all the thing Photoshop does For most people, yes. Unfortunately Photoshop is pirated, so it isn't being used at face value. > Blender does all that Maya does I'm sure as well If you want to build your own stuff, which isn't uncommon at all and if you have a movie budget of 100 million dollars, you might be better off forking Blender. Also, Autodesk's Maya is not a startup and it isn't being used necessarily as a platform, so that's building a straw-man on your part ;-) > SCADA systems for industrial control? You mean Eclipse SCADA? Funny thing is that I'm working on a software system using it right now. My mission is to steer and monitor power plants and nothing on the market was suitable for my needs. Building on top of an open source stack helped tremendously.
threeseed 12y ago
The issue isn't with closed source databases. The issue is with trusting smaller startups who don't have a customer base large enough to avoid dropping. Oracle and Teradata for example are proven databases with official support available worldwide and a talent pool you can draw from almost immediately. You don't get that with most open source databases (at least those that don't have a parent e.g. Datastax, Mongo, MySQL).
- YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  If no one allowed small-startup technology into production, then the industry stagnation would be tremendous, so I disagree that is the issue. However, once you do rely on a small-startup database, it better be closed source, so I disagree: the issue is the closed-source part, not the small-startup part.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    This is why the world needs early adopters. There needs to be people interested enough in new technologies for their own sake to invest time in them. That's a very different motivation than P&G or Unilever.
    - threeseed 12y ago
      Exactly. There is room in this world for closed and open source products. Enterprise companies will trade technology for stability and supportability. Most of us will flip the other way.
      - mathattack 12y ago
        I oversimplify it by saying "Companies will pay cash and accept closed source in return for good documentation and someone to answer the phone." Most non-IT buyers don't bring up open vs closed source in purchasing discussions.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
throwawaymsft 12y ago
There is a species of parasite that infects ants, making them climb blades of grass so they are eaten by wandering bovines. The cow was the target all along, not the ant.
- differentView 12y ago
  Who's who?
  - wishinghand 12y ago
    FoundationDB is the parasite, wanting to be eaten by the cow (Apple). It was eaten up by ants(companies that need noSQL, ACID databases) and they brought its attention to the cow.
  - lalos 12y ago
    The parasite is the DB company, the ants are the users and the bovine is Apple
    - collyw 12y ago
      All of them are a steaming pile of cowshit?
- rylee 12y ago
  Hey, isn't that a quote from a book? Could have sworn I heard it ages ago in a book I enjoyed very much! I think it was Peeps.
  - poglet 12y ago
    You can find some more info here (not about the book): http://www.damninteresting.com/a-fluke-of-nature/ http://www.damninteresting.com/a-fluke-of-nature/
  - notduncansmith 12y ago
    Peeps, IIRC, was trematodes[1]. After the opening action sequence, the narrator rambles about how trematodes infect snails to get to the birds that eat the snails. Still involves the intermediate host[2] concept, though. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trematoda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trematoda [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_host http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_host
jandrewrogers 12y ago
There are two reasons why many companies run a closed source database. For some types of databases, there is no good equivalent in open source. For some types of workloads, the closed source implementations are orders of magnitude more efficient, faster, or scalable than anything in open source, so open source cannot reasonably support the workload. It happens more often than you'd think. There are still many things in the database world that open source does relatively poorly compared to alternatives.
- jasondc 12y ago
  What is an example of something done much better by a closed source database (compared to open source)?
  - lclarkmichalek 12y ago
    Stardog[0], a semantic/ontological[1] database, is probably best in class, and is closed source. Anyone interested in writing a open source triplestore, email me ;) [0] http://stardog.com/ http://stardog.com/ [1] They've started calling it a graph database, though I think triplestore is the most correct name
    - derefr 12y ago
      One could be "interested in writing a open source triplestore", but why would you go down that path rather than, say, optimizing the heck out of Neo4J?
      - maxdemarzi 12y ago
        If you want to help "optimizing the heck out of Neo4j", we are hiring http://neo4j.com/jobs/ http://neo4j.com/jobs/
      - eternalban 12y ago
        Do you mean forking the codebase or layering something like N3 over it? (btw, last I checked the Neo4j community version could only scale up and the distributed version was commercial.)
serve_yay 12y ago
I do.
kogir 12y ago
Or get a 5-10 year support contract for things critical to your company's function?
- itcmcgrath 12y ago
  All sorts of ways around that, so it's unlikely you would get a contract that precludes you not being out of support before the term is up. As a thought experiment, if the company just went bankrupt and had no one working for it any more, you contract won't help right? Second part, what happens if someone just buys the assets (IP) and closes the company, then hires the old team? There are many possible variants here.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    Or pays out the contract and the value of the payout doesn't cover the cost to your business?
ddispaltro 12y ago
This is actually kinda ridiculous. I feel so bad for companies that have invested in this product. Just pulling the downloads like that... wow. I'm hoping that paying customers at least got some heads up, data migration is the hardest thing to get right. Good luck to all the former FDB'ers.
- sigzero 12y ago
  Contracts for support just don't go poof.
  - ddispaltro 12y ago
    I am aware of that. My comment isn't about physical contracts, it's about expectations of a database company.
    - emsy 12y ago
      Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs (About support contracts vs. community support)
  - onion2k 12y ago
    No, but the support itself does. Then it becomes a legal issue, with you taking Apple to court, and you still don't have database updates or support.
  - Joeri 12y ago
    Contracts for support are mostly useless in any case when your service is down and you need to get a vendor to respond in a timely fashion. If they are in breach of contract, you have no mechanism to force them into compliance in a short enough timeframe. I've been in situations several times where a vendor with a paid support contract just couldn't fix a problem fast enough and I was forced to dig into their product myself to figure out a fix. This is why everything you build your own product on and that can't be replaced in a matter of hours by a competing product should come with source. Worst-case scenario, you fix the issue in source yourself.
illicium 12y ago
It's fairly common to have contract terms requiring the SaaS provider to provide the source code to their (typically closed-source) product in case they go under. Of course, that only helps if you buy the product or support for it and not just rely on free downloads.
onestone 12y ago
> I don't understand why anyone would run a closed source database, especially with the open source options available. I generally share this opinion. However, in this case no open source solution came close to the features offered by FoundationDB. There are a couple of attempts (like CockroachDB) which could achieve something similar in the future. One more reason for me to hate Apple now.
- biokoda 12y ago
  ActorDB is quite similar
  - onestone 12y ago
    Not really. Architecture-wise it is very different.
ssmoot 12y ago
Because HA, simple to use solutions are very expensive, closed source, or operationally costly. if you think you've got the secret sauce, and you've actually had to put it into action and still hit five nines, awesome. But IME doing that with something like PostgreSQL is non-trivial (read: costly). That's why FoundationDB looked so appealing (to me).
- bbulkow 12y ago
  Biased opinion here (Aerospike CTO and Founder), but you might want to check out open-source Aerospike DB. Like Foundation, it's clustered by default, very very good at SSD / Flash, runs great in cloud deployments, etc. It's been used in production by big ad houses like AppNexus as well as retailers like SnapDeal. Lots of miles on the code. Was closed source for years, but went open source about 9 months ago.
  - jakevn 12y ago
    Does Aerospike offer transactions?
    - jhugg 12y ago
      It seems they offer per-key transactions. VoltDB offers full transactions / open-source. Lots of differences between us and Aerospike / FDB.
      - ddorian43 12y ago
        No high availability on open-source. Meant to be used with partitioning in mind so if you need cross-partition transactions most of the time, it's slow.
        jhugg 12y ago
        VoltDB has fantastic HA, but yes, not in the OSS version. You might be surprised how many apps deploy on VoltDB with cross-partition transactions making up a solid chunk of their workload. Yes, they're slower than partitioned operations, but they're still faster than MySQL much of the time. Most of the apps we see partition very well, especially for writes. The fact that they can run 10k distributed aggregates a second to get a global view is something few other systems can touch.
dlau1 12y ago
https://github.com/FoundationDB/ https://github.com/FoundationDB/ looks to be emptied out This organization has no public repositories.
eadz 12y ago
Anyone have a cache of the downloads for OSX and Linux?
alatkins 12y ago
I think it's reasonable to expect any company doing anything vaguely important to do configuration management at least to the level of keeping copies of their production software installation binaries.
markpapadakis 12y ago
This is really about closed source, proprietary infrastructure technology (not all kinds of software in general ), offered by startups, not established companies. That is to say, people use Oracle, SQL server, Teradata, etc and they are not worried they will go out of business or be sold or otherwise that they will be left in the dark by a sudden shift in business practices and product availability. The problem is almost entirely with startups, which are an easy target for bigger companies interested in their technology and team skills set. This is even more so an issue because the majority of startups are VC funded and are under pressure to sell or comply with VCs interests. So in practice you have three ‘safe’ ways to build your infrastructure, which are not mutually exclusive. Choose OSS software, buy from companies such as Oracle, IBM, HANA, etc, and build it yourself. Depending on the expertise of your team and funds available for purchases, as well as qualifies of the available solutions, OSS is probably the safest way, followed by purchased from large corps. Rolling your own infrastructure is expensive, time consuming, requires committing your developers to building infrastructure instead of well, building a product, and may not work in the end at all. Even the companies that can afford to do it everything in house (Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc) choose OSS for the majority of their needs and build on top of that. Google is Google. However, if that infrastructure is your selling point and what differentiates you from the rest, and/or you have very specific needs and makes more sense to do it this way, doing it yourself can be a great alternative. We rarely use OSS here, and we don’t use any proprietary infrastructure technology. We have built everything ourselves, and it has worked out great so far, but we have put a lot more effort and resources into that, whereas we could have instead invested on the Product. If we had to make a choice again, in retrospect, we ‘d most likely have gone the OSS way. It’s all about tradeoffs.
- lwf 12y ago
  > We have built everything ourselves, and it has worked out great so far, but we have put a lot more effort and resources into that, whereas we could have instead invested on the Product. So, you don't use a libc, or a web framework, or any library that implements common logic that other programmers have spent ages refining? If yes, erk, I don't want to be anywhere near that codebase. If not, I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng

by jasondc 12y ago

smt88 12y ago

The acquire-hire-kill cycle for startups that target developers has become really frustrating. I'd love to try a lot of these new products, but it's hard to know if it's worth my time.

jcdavis 12y ago
Tragedy of the commons in action. Every VC-backed startup is incentivized to sell, but in the process continues to kill goodwill towards dev startups. I'd be super hesitant of relying on any other company for core tech with high switching cost for this reason.
- smt88 12y ago
  This doesn't have to be the case. What if startups with high switching costs (DBMS, OS, pretty much anything else infrastructural) added a guarantee to their sales contracts? For example, it could be that, if they get acquired, they'll open-source the technology, sell it to another for-profit entity that will maintain it, or provide a migration tool. Even for something like FoundationDB, it'd hardly be any skin off Apple's back to have a few employees spend a few months ensuring that previous customers have some sort of support.
  - josho 12y ago
    This is simply the risk you take being an early adopter. If you are uncomfortable with the risk then choose something from IBM/oracle/et al.
    - smt88 12y ago
      I do choose established providers. The problem is for the community as a whole -- each company that this happens to is another hit to the credibility of early startups.
    - lambda 12y ago
      Or choose free software. If it's free software, even if the original developer goes away, you can hire someone to keep working on it, or someone else can decide to make a business supporting it, or the like.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        Or you just get left with a broken OSS project whose contributors moved on to shinier things, and nobody really much cares about continuing it, and you don't have the knowledge/time/resources to hire someone to do it.
        danieldk 12y ago
        But if the product is already working, chances are that you get away long enough (to do a graceful migration) by just doing small bug fixes, changes to support OS updates, etc. This is what we are now doing for a project with Berkeley DB XML, which hadn't seen updates for five years. When there finally was an update, it was buggy and moved to the Affero GPL 3, which conflicts with other open source licenses used in the project. So, we continue to use the five year old iteration with a small set of patches. (Lesson learned: once a product is owned by Oracle, prepare your evacuation plans.)
        collyw 12y ago
        I was agreeing with the previous posters until I realized this has kind of happened to me. Tastypie was the go-to REST package for Django 3 years ago. Now it has kind of been abandoned and everyone is ranting about Django-REST-Framework. Fortunately it is stable (for my use cases), and it doesn't actually seem ton be that big a deal that it isn't being worked on. Django_REST_framework is a lot nicer though.
  - ef4 12y ago
    It's hard to really guarantee effectively without putting up serious money. The typical large closed-source codebase is full of undocumented things and hidden dependencies on random chunks of proprietary environment. Making it usable as open source is a ton of work. And you can't guarantee that work will happen without putting up some kind of bond or buying insurance, given that the vendor could simply go bankrupt and not honor the contract.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >What if startups with high switching costs (DBMS, OS, pretty much anything else infrastructural) added a guarantee to their sales contracts? For example, it could be that, if they get acquired, they'll open-source the technology, sell it to another for-profit entity that will maintain it, or provide a migration tool. That would be like them putting a huge paper hat on their head, saying "I'm not a good target for acquisition". Companies buy them so they (also) get their product/IP etc. If those startups have promised to give it away in such a case, then they are not that good of a buy.
    - smt88 12y ago
      Those are just contingencies if the acquirer doesn't want to sell the product anymore. Basically it's a guarantee that, even if they get acquired, their customers won't be punished. That scenario won't hurt companies that are being acquired with the intent of keeping the product running, for obvious reasons. It also shouldn't hurt acqui-hire scenarios. The only time it might hurt is when the acquirer wants to use the technology internally, but not offer it to anyone else. That's fairly rare, and the downside (potentially scaring away that tiny fraction of acquirers) is much smaller than the upside (making potential customers feel safe).
  - Joeri 12y ago
    Even if you get a few months of reliable support, you still have to switch which will cost you dearly. Often what is done is source escrow. The source is given to a third party, and if anything goes wrong the third party releases the source to the one who purchased the product.
    - jon-wood 12y ago
      Even this sounds like a bad outcome for users of the tool. One minute you're building a product, the next you're stuck maintaining a closed source database.
andyjdavis 12y ago
Can you (or anyone else) explain why these occur? Is it simply a case of the acquirer wanting the technology and maybe the personnel while the acquired company is losing money hand over fist so they just shut the company down?
- hkmurakami 12y ago
  It's a question of whether the acquirer and/or the acquiree have a good faith social contract with the early adopters who take the risk and believe in them.
- smt88 12y ago
  Sometimes it's because the product is on the way to failure in the market. It might be a great product, but that doesn't mean it'll ever be profitable. The acquirer may love the technology and use it internally, but it's expensive to keep it in a public marketplace. It requires support staff, marketing, sales, etc. There are also acquisitions that are purely about customers, so the startup's product is shut down or rolled into the acquirer's existing products. So there are a lot of good reasons you'd want to company other than its product, but we can't always tell which reason it is right away.
- pjc50 12y ago
  There is no transfer pricing mechanism for programmers like there is for footballers. Worse, programmers are often loyal to a particular technology or concept. So in order to extract the valuable staff from a company it's necessary to destroy that thing so the staff can be reallocated profitably. "Technology" is rarely re-used per se.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    "So in order to extract the valuable staff from a company it's necessary to destroy that thing so the staff can be reallocated profitably." I wonder how often this actually works. In most cases where I've seen this (or heard of it happening first hand from people I know) the vast majority of the people you'd want to keep were out the door of the new place pretty close to as soon as possible (meaning, as soon as the contracts allow, or the golden handcuffs are mostly off, or whatever is relevant to the specific situation). On the inside there tends to be a pretty predictable path: New management tells everyone nothing will change materially, everything inevitably changes very quickly, people get disgruntled and take off for other opportunities (at a quickly accelerating pace as the old guard sees all their former colleagues from the old place leaving the new).
PublicEnemy111 12y ago
I've been wondering if there's a sort of nash equilibrium to these things. How many startups will a restaurant let auction its open tables before losing faith in all of them?
bad_user 12y ago
Here's a simple rule you can apply - if it's closed source, then it's not worth your time. Like, don't build on top of freaking closed source platforms and after 17 years of OSI, 24 years of GPLv2 and myriads of open-source alternatives available, you'd think people would learn.
- troels 12y ago
  Except of course if there is no oss alternative and you can't conceivably build it on your own. But yeah - Pretty much agree. The fact that most oss products are best-of-class makes the choice even easier.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    If there isn't: a) look at building your own. What's inconceivable to one person may not be to another. b) Build support for at least two closed-source alternatives, and make sure you always have at least two current alternatives.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  "if it's closed source, then it's not worth your time." Of course. Because Gimp does all the thing Photoshop does Blender does all that Maya does I'm sure as well. SCADA systems for industrial control? Just download the first one that shows up on Google. EDA systems? Sure, there's a GPL alternative. People use Mentor (as an example) because they don't know better.
  - Joeri 12y ago
    Startups don't make another photoshop, they make another gimp and hope to grow it into another photoshop over time, or hope to get bought out by a company that makes another photoshop and wants their talent and technology.
  - bad_user 12y ago
    > Gimp does all the thing Photoshop does For most people, yes. Unfortunately Photoshop is pirated, so it isn't being used at face value. > Blender does all that Maya does I'm sure as well If you want to build your own stuff, which isn't uncommon at all and if you have a movie budget of 100 million dollars, you might be better off forking Blender. Also, Autodesk's Maya is not a startup and it isn't being used necessarily as a platform, so that's building a straw-man on your part ;-) > SCADA systems for industrial control? You mean Eclipse SCADA? Funny thing is that I'm working on a software system using it right now. My mission is to steer and monitor power plants and nothing on the market was suitable for my needs. Building on top of an open source stack helped tremendously.

threeseed 12y ago

The issue isn't with closed source databases. The issue is with trusting smaller startups who don't have a customer base large enough to avoid dropping. Oracle and Teradata for example are proven databases with official support available worldwide and a talent pool you can draw from almost immediately. You don't get that with most open source databases (at least those that don't have a parent e.g. Datastax, Mongo, MySQL).

YuriNiyazov 12y ago
If no one allowed small-startup technology into production, then the industry stagnation would be tremendous, so I disagree that is the issue. However, once you do rely on a small-startup database, it better be closed source, so I disagree: the issue is the closed-source part, not the small-startup part.
- mathattack 12y ago
  This is why the world needs early adopters. There needs to be people interested enough in new technologies for their own sake to invest time in them. That's a very different motivation than P&G or Unilever.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Exactly. There is room in this world for closed and open source products. Enterprise companies will trade technology for stability and supportability. Most of us will flip the other way.
    - mathattack 12y ago
      I oversimplify it by saying "Companies will pay cash and accept closed source in return for good documentation and someone to answer the phone." Most non-IT buyers don't bring up open vs closed source in purchasing discussions.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

throwawaymsft 12y ago

There is a species of parasite that infects ants, making them climb blades of grass so they are eaten by wandering bovines. The cow was the target all along, not the ant.

differentView 12y ago
Who's who?
- wishinghand 12y ago
  FoundationDB is the parasite, wanting to be eaten by the cow (Apple). It was eaten up by ants(companies that need noSQL, ACID databases) and they brought its attention to the cow.
- lalos 12y ago
  The parasite is the DB company, the ants are the users and the bovine is Apple
  - collyw 12y ago
    All of them are a steaming pile of cowshit?
rylee 12y ago
Hey, isn't that a quote from a book? Could have sworn I heard it ages ago in a book I enjoyed very much! I think it was Peeps.
- poglet 12y ago
  You can find some more info here (not about the book): http://www.damninteresting.com/a-fluke-of-nature/ http://www.damninteresting.com/a-fluke-of-nature/
- notduncansmith 12y ago
  Peeps, IIRC, was trematodes[1]. After the opening action sequence, the narrator rambles about how trematodes infect snails to get to the birds that eat the snails. Still involves the intermediate host[2] concept, though. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trematoda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trematoda [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_host http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_host

jandrewrogers 12y ago

There are two reasons why many companies run a closed source database. For some types of databases, there is no good equivalent in open source. For some types of workloads, the closed source implementations are orders of magnitude more efficient, faster, or scalable than anything in open source, so open source cannot reasonably support the workload. It happens more often than you'd think. There are still many things in the database world that open source does relatively poorly compared to alternatives.

jasondc 12y ago
What is an example of something done much better by a closed source database (compared to open source)?
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  Stardog[0], a semantic/ontological[1] database, is probably best in class, and is closed source. Anyone interested in writing a open source triplestore, email me ;) [0] http://stardog.com/ http://stardog.com/ [1] They've started calling it a graph database, though I think triplestore is the most correct name
  - derefr 12y ago
    One could be "interested in writing a open source triplestore", but why would you go down that path rather than, say, optimizing the heck out of Neo4J?
    - maxdemarzi 12y ago
      If you want to help "optimizing the heck out of Neo4j", we are hiring http://neo4j.com/jobs/ http://neo4j.com/jobs/
    - eternalban 12y ago
      Do you mean forking the codebase or layering something like N3 over it? (btw, last I checked the Neo4j community version could only scale up and the distributed version was commercial.)

serve_yay 12y ago

I do.

kogir 12y ago

Or get a 5-10 year support contract for things critical to your company's function?

itcmcgrath 12y ago
All sorts of ways around that, so it's unlikely you would get a contract that precludes you not being out of support before the term is up. As a thought experiment, if the company just went bankrupt and had no one working for it any more, you contract won't help right? Second part, what happens if someone just buys the assets (IP) and closes the company, then hires the old team? There are many possible variants here.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Or pays out the contract and the value of the payout doesn't cover the cost to your business?

ddispaltro 12y ago

This is actually kinda ridiculous. I feel so bad for companies that have invested in this product. Just pulling the downloads like that... wow. I'm hoping that paying customers at least got some heads up, data migration is the hardest thing to get right. Good luck to all the former FDB'ers.

sigzero 12y ago
Contracts for support just don't go poof.
- ddispaltro 12y ago
  I am aware of that. My comment isn't about physical contracts, it's about expectations of a database company.
  - emsy 12y ago
    Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs (About support contracts vs. community support)
- onion2k 12y ago
  No, but the support itself does. Then it becomes a legal issue, with you taking Apple to court, and you still don't have database updates or support.
- Joeri 12y ago
  Contracts for support are mostly useless in any case when your service is down and you need to get a vendor to respond in a timely fashion. If they are in breach of contract, you have no mechanism to force them into compliance in a short enough timeframe. I've been in situations several times where a vendor with a paid support contract just couldn't fix a problem fast enough and I was forced to dig into their product myself to figure out a fix. This is why everything you build your own product on and that can't be replaced in a matter of hours by a competing product should come with source. Worst-case scenario, you fix the issue in source yourself.

illicium 12y ago

It's fairly common to have contract terms requiring the SaaS provider to provide the source code to their (typically closed-source) product in case they go under. Of course, that only helps if you buy the product or support for it and not just rely on free downloads.

onestone 12y ago

> I don't understand why anyone would run a closed source database, especially with the open source options available. I generally share this opinion. However, in this case no open source solution came close to the features offered by FoundationDB. There are a couple of attempts (like CockroachDB) which could achieve something similar in the future. One more reason for me to hate Apple now.

biokoda 12y ago
ActorDB is quite similar
- onestone 12y ago
  Not really. Architecture-wise it is very different.

ssmoot 12y ago

Because HA, simple to use solutions are very expensive, closed source, or operationally costly. if you think you've got the secret sauce, and you've actually had to put it into action and still hit five nines, awesome. But IME doing that with something like PostgreSQL is non-trivial (read: costly). That's why FoundationDB looked so appealing (to me).

bbulkow 12y ago
Biased opinion here (Aerospike CTO and Founder), but you might want to check out open-source Aerospike DB. Like Foundation, it's clustered by default, very very good at SSD / Flash, runs great in cloud deployments, etc. It's been used in production by big ad houses like AppNexus as well as retailers like SnapDeal. Lots of miles on the code. Was closed source for years, but went open source about 9 months ago.
- jakevn 12y ago
  Does Aerospike offer transactions?
  - jhugg 12y ago
    It seems they offer per-key transactions. VoltDB offers full transactions / open-source. Lots of differences between us and Aerospike / FDB.
    - ddorian43 12y ago
      No high availability on open-source. Meant to be used with partitioning in mind so if you need cross-partition transactions most of the time, it's slow.
      - jhugg 12y ago
        VoltDB has fantastic HA, but yes, not in the OSS version. You might be surprised how many apps deploy on VoltDB with cross-partition transactions making up a solid chunk of their workload. Yes, they're slower than partitioned operations, but they're still faster than MySQL much of the time. Most of the apps we see partition very well, especially for writes. The fact that they can run 10k distributed aggregates a second to get a global view is something few other systems can touch.

dlau1 12y ago

https://github.com/FoundationDB/ https://github.com/FoundationDB/ looks to be emptied out This organization has no public repositories.

eadz 12y ago

Anyone have a cache of the downloads for OSX and Linux?

alatkins 12y ago

I think it's reasonable to expect any company doing anything vaguely important to do configuration management at least to the level of keeping copies of their production software installation binaries.

markpapadakis 12y ago

This is really about closed source, proprietary infrastructure technology (not all kinds of software in general ), offered by startups, not established companies. That is to say, people use Oracle, SQL server, Teradata, etc and they are not worried they will go out of business or be sold or otherwise that they will be left in the dark by a sudden shift in business practices and product availability. The problem is almost entirely with startups, which are an easy target for bigger companies interested in their technology and team skills set. This is even more so an issue because the majority of startups are VC funded and are under pressure to sell or comply with VCs interests. So in practice you have three ‘safe’ ways to build your infrastructure, which are not mutually exclusive. Choose OSS software, buy from companies such as Oracle, IBM, HANA, etc, and build it yourself. Depending on the expertise of your team and funds available for purchases, as well as qualifies of the available solutions, OSS is probably the safest way, followed by purchased from large corps. Rolling your own infrastructure is expensive, time consuming, requires committing your developers to building infrastructure instead of well, building a product, and may not work in the end at all. Even the companies that can afford to do it everything in house (Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc) choose OSS for the majority of their needs and build on top of that. Google is Google. However, if that infrastructure is your selling point and what differentiates you from the rest, and/or you have very specific needs and makes more sense to do it this way, doing it yourself can be a great alternative. We rarely use OSS here, and we don’t use any proprietary infrastructure technology. We have built everything ourselves, and it has worked out great so far, but we have put a lot more effort and resources into that, whereas we could have instead invested on the Product. If we had to make a choice again, in retrospect, we ‘d most likely have gone the OSS way. It’s all about tradeoffs.

lwf 12y ago
> We have built everything ourselves, and it has worked out great so far, but we have put a lot more effort and resources into that, whereas we could have instead invested on the Product. So, you don't use a libc, or a web framework, or any library that implements common logic that other programmers have spent ages refining? If yes, erk, I don't want to be anywhere near that codebase. If not, I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng