Are open source databases dead? | Hacker News Reader

Are open source databases dead?

zdnet.com

9 pointsalexrustic7 comments

There is an important distinction between community driven open source databases (ex: Postgres) and open source databases that are developed, maintained and owned by a single corporate sponsor.

I never understood the elastic drama.

Elastic has a surplus of technical knowledge but an infrastructure debt.

Amazon has a surplus of infrastructure and doesn't want to duplicate years of effort.

The logical thing would have been for elastic to setup their hosted service themselves and beat Amazon to the punch.

But they didn't. They stood up elastic cloud in AWS of all places. Way to make sure Amazon gets 100% market share in your home market.

Then they get all bent out of shape because Amazon used the license the way it was intended, but elastic didn't want THEM to use it like that. Everybody else was fine but Amazon doing it is somehow wrong.

I call it fair weather open source. "I can't do this myself, and I don't want anyone else to do it for me... I just want to be remembered for doing it." Like it's possible to have a product nobody can use but everyone will remember.

A lot of this comes from database companies not thinking through what they want to give away and what they want to keep as "the secret sauce".

With KeyDB we kept it super simple. Open Source KeyDB is open source under a BSD license. For things we want to charge for we keep them completely separate and don't play games with things like "shared source". For open source to work you need an open license, otherwise it's not fair to the external contributors.

I wasn't familiar with KeyDB and looked it up: a multithreaded fork of Redis. Very clear.

What wasn't clear to me was how the line between Community and Pro versions is drawn. They both have multithreaded operation but the Pro is 'advanced', also MVCC. Great features but no clear principle why any particular feature should be Community vs Pro.

I think that's reasonable feedback. We need to do a better job explaining Pro vs Open Source. Our guiding philosophy was Open Source is the best cache database we can make. Pro is the best database and with that comes more grown up features you don't find in a cache.

+1 That is so much clearer and immediately acceptable.

Is there a good source of list of projects that have de-opened their projects? This seems like a historical artifact worth capturing.

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