4 ms·

Do any of you know if Apple has acquired companies which are partially open-source (FDB SQL layer) with a substantial technologist user-base before? Knowing th

Do any of you know if Apple has acquired companies which are partially open-source (FDB SQL layer) with a substantial technologist user-base before? Knowing their past behavior would be an interesting indicator of what is most likely to follow here. According to the TC article (and their website), FDB is no longer available for download and there is a "goodbye"-esque type of message on their community site [0]. Their github [1] repos have all now been made private. This seems most unfortunate for anyone who's included FDB in their tech stack. For reference, FoundationDB has been compared to Google's F1 database [2] [3], so this is Apple purchasing a pretty shiny piece of technology. [0] http://community.foundationdb.com/index.html http://community.foundationdb.com/index.html [1] https://github.com/FoundationDB/ https://github.com/FoundationDB/ [2] http://blog.foundationdb.com/7-things-that-make-google-f1-and-the-foundationdb-sql-layer-so-strikingly-similar http://blog.foundationdb.com/7-things-that-make-google-f1-an... [3] F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales - http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41344.html

josephpmay 12y ago
Technically, NeXT was partially open-source, and they maintained Darwin for awhile, but it's pretty much dead now. Edit: More recently, they killed off OpenNI about a year after buying PrimeSense
eloff 12y ago
Looks like an acquire hire and product kill scenario.
mdasen 12y ago
Apple acquired CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) which is still used by a lot of Linux distros (like Ubuntu and Fedora). CUPS was bought by Apple in 2007 and continues to have open source releases and continues to be used by major Linux distros. For FoundationDB, there isn't really the same market. Most sites don't need a distributed database. People that run sites is already niche and people that run sites trafficked enough to require a distributed database is even more niche. I use HBase and Kafka a lot and there are definitely high-profile users of the software, but it's nowhere near the number of users of MySQL or PostgreSQL. Maybe Apple will look at FoundationDB as something where open-source in no way hurts them and gets them free development. Google won't be replacing F1/Spanner with it so it's not much help to what a lot of people would consider Apple's largest competition. Plus, open-source could help make it better.
- justin66 12y ago
  CUPS was fully open source when it was acquired.
Decade 12y ago
Not an open-source project, and not a big user-base, but Apple bought P.A. Semi and canceled the PWRficient line of POWER-architecture chips.[1] Presumably, that was inconvenient for P.A. Semi's customers. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168406 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168406

josephpmay 12y ago

Technically, NeXT was partially open-source, and they maintained Darwin for awhile, but it's pretty much dead now. Edit: More recently, they killed off OpenNI about a year after buying PrimeSense

eloff 12y ago

Looks like an acquire hire and product kill scenario.

mdasen 12y ago

Apple acquired CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) which is still used by a lot of Linux distros (like Ubuntu and Fedora). CUPS was bought by Apple in 2007 and continues to have open source releases and continues to be used by major Linux distros. For FoundationDB, there isn't really the same market. Most sites don't need a distributed database. People that run sites is already niche and people that run sites trafficked enough to require a distributed database is even more niche. I use HBase and Kafka a lot and there are definitely high-profile users of the software, but it's nowhere near the number of users of MySQL or PostgreSQL. Maybe Apple will look at FoundationDB as something where open-source in no way hurts them and gets them free development. Google won't be replacing F1/Spanner with it so it's not much help to what a lot of people would consider Apple's largest competition. Plus, open-source could help make it better.

justin66 12y ago
CUPS was fully open source when it was acquired.

Decade 12y ago

Not an open-source project, and not a big user-base, but Apple bought P.A. Semi and canceled the PWRficient line of POWER-architecture chips.[1] Presumably, that was inconvenient for P.A. Semi's customers. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168406 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168406