Hacker News Reader

Comment by tkiolp4 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think we are going to reach a point in which it’s very hard (perhaps impossible) to maintain big codebases (like postgres) due to the lack of maintainers? Would that mean the end of such projects? Or perhaps big corporations would take over at a high price (forking the project and publishing it under a price tag)?

View on HN

Doesn't really make sense. The big tech companies pay many contributors as employees, allowing projects like postgres to offer a portable solution

Microsoft sells SQL Server with its proprietary features while also offering managed Postgres

Postgres development being hard because it's mature also means its indefinitely good since it's mature. A core slowly improving a solid codebase keeps stability

That's an ongoing discussion in the Postgres community [0], primarily because Postgres is 100% written in C.

As for the future, I don't know. Not many companies can maintain full forks. I've noticed, however, from my professional experience that businesses are willing to hire freelancers to code specific things. (e.g., I've had a few Postgres gigs to write custom Postgres extensions. 50% C and 50% SQL/PgSQL). But yeah, I guess lots of C projects will become like COBOL ones.

0: https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2023/10/10/postgres-the-next-g...

I see a different option. At some point someone will start a new db project that will take over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com