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Naming is hard! Facebook used to have a _different_ Scribe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(log_server)).

We used it at a company I worked for, but it had long-since been deprecated, so I was confused when I saw this Scribe.

This is the same scribe. Facebook closed-sourced it because it was too hard to maintain an open version and a version that addresses Facebook's needs.

I wonder why couldn't they just make the open source version address their needs...

The version that was open-sourced kept evolving and integrating with other internal systems at Facebook. That's what made it hard to continue open-sourcing it (why the open-sourced version was discontinued) and why the current version is also hard to open-source.

Maybe one day we'll have a version available. In any case, one of the larger parts of the system (LogDevice) is open source :)

(disclaimer: I work in Scribe)

LogDevice: https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/open-sourcing-logdevice...

>"The growing number of complex components made it difficult to retain an open source version stripped of our internal specifications. This complexity is the main reason that we archived the open source Scribe project. The current version of Scribe’s architecture is detailed below, with a focus on the components that comprise the data plane. ". Quoted from the article.

Scribe is also an enterprise integration/ETL tool. For _many_ years before FB existed.

Interesting! Just found out about this, and I googled it out. TIBCO acquired Scribe Software, and Scribe Software was running as early as 1998-1999! :D

https://web.archive.org/web/20120301000000*/http://www.scrib...

The initial stuff seems to not be so related, but the current description of what they do seems much much closer to what Facebook's Scribe does today :)

Naming is hard! :D

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