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Comment by kiwicopple | Hacker News Reader

Every component of Supabase is MIT, Apache 2, or Postgres licensed - apart from the dashboard

The code to self host it is in our main repo: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker

I do think we could have better/cleared docs, which we can fix up tomorrow.

Re investment: we raised 6M, and we are under no pressure to trade our integrity for growth. We have open-source-friendly and patient investors (Mozilla, Coatue, YC), and a nice group of developers: https://supabase.io/blog/2021/03/25/angels-of-supabase

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Is there a difference between Firebase's "open source" and Suprabase's "open source"? Is Suprabase more open than Firebase in some manner, or does "an open source Firebase alternative" just mean "a Firebase competitor that also open sources its client side tools?" Is some part of the Firebase code closed source or less "Open" where the Suprabase equivalent is not? I haven't used Firebase much, so maybe I'm missing a big distinction.

Firebase is completely closed source and make it extremely hard to migrate any moderate size project.

Supabase builds on open source parts that everyone is already familiar with. Postgres for data store instead of firestore (which is a proprietary nosql Google cloud database with many quirks to keep you in). GoTrue for Auth which is an open source project by netlify. Real-time to provide Postgres changes over sockets open sourced by them. There are many parts which make up "supabase".

Supabase hosting provide a unified experience through their dashboard and manage all these parts for you. That isn't open source.

The actual UI kit for that is open source, though.

Dashboard doesn't stop you from migrating your backend infrastructure somewhere else. It does result in degraded developer experience which can be the biggest distinction.

> Is some part of the Firebase code closed source or less "Open" where the Supabase equivalent is not?

All of the Firebase backend is proprietary, and their client code is open source.

The Supabase backend is here: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker

This is the set up we use for every project on our hosted platform. These backend tools are either built by Supabase, supported by Supabase (we employ maintainers), or licensed with OSI-compliant licenses.

Our client libraries are all open source, Apache 2.0 licensed.

Supabase is open source in every definition of the word. I think the problem is our self-hosting docs, so we'll spend the day improving this.

Ah, gotcha. So Supabase has backend that is also open source which could theoretically be used for self hosting? Yes, that is a difference. It wasn't clear to me from the docs. Thanks!

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