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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this exactly WHY this blog post exists? They are open sourcing this software so that they don't have to maintain it all internally anymore.

They had a need that an existing "off-the-shelf open source" project didn't solve, so they created this an are now turning it into an "off-the-shelf open source" project so they can keep using it without having to maintain it entirely themselves.

How are these open source tools supposed to be created in the first place? This is the process, someone has to do it

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Usually the corporate needs differ too much and they end up keeping their own fork anyway.

Netflix has the resources to maintain this. It's probably more a PR move for their hiring division.

Absolutely this. It literally happened to me with a Netflix OSS we were using at work. I found a bug that was biting us, opened a ticket with a PR attached with a possible fix and got an answer after a few months "ah yeah we fixed this in our internal version time ago, thanks, will merge it now".

Indeed, this is not open-source: this is public-source. They don't really open the project to external contribution, they just publish their code and continue the project as their tool. They will not have incentive to add features that are not useful to their business even if it useful to the community (if provided by a PR for example), because all the developers of the project are employed by the same company and this company doesn't have any reason to review and fix code that is not part of their business.

> Indeed, this is not open-source: this is public-source. They don't really open the project to external contribution

It's open source, and they don't have to accept external contributions. Terms have a well-defined meaning, please refrain from calling open source code not open source, and not open source code, open source.

You are arguing the difference between the letter and spirit of the law.

you can fork it and continue dev in case they change their mind, it is open source.

any other 'source available' licenses would not (legally) let you do that.

It has the Apache license, definitely Open Source. https://github.com/Netflix/maestro/blob/main/LICENSE

I think the contention here is more about whether it's an open project— does it have an open bugtracker, an open project management structure, clear governance, etc.

It not having those things is fine, and eventually someone may still take the source and create an open project around it. But understanding that is a Netflix project helps calibrate people's understanding around whether the model when you find a bug is going to be "fork, fix, and run the fork indefinitely" or "fork, fix, contribution accepted, drop fork and return to upstream."

It's absolutely open source, under the Apache license. If a nascent community takes it and runs with it then the public version will become dominant.

So Netflix expects open source community to pick up the maintenance tab ?

I understand how open source proejcts are born, but I struggle to see what is novelty of this project. Just another Java CRUD app with some questionable design choices that are only applicable to netflix:

1. They claim it is distributed system, but it is just a regular Java crud with SQL backend

2. Java-like DSL with parser and classloader (why? Just why?)

Projects like these are the perfect examples of Enterprise Grade FizzBuzz (https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...) and this is exactly what I dont like about it

> So Netflix expects open source community to pick up the maintenance tab ?

In fairness, the very nature of open source is that the community is only going to pick up the maintenance tab if the value they're getting out of it is worth it.

You are making great points. This is power of Netflix marketing and branding that they are considered as cutting edge tech company. In reality most of Netflix Java projects are pretty mediocre Enterprise Java stuff. Last year or so they have mandated Spring Boot as their development platform for all their web services.

This is exactly same stack I have to deal daily and management reason is it is lowest common denominator that works well with 3-month contract developer to deliver Nth micro service whose sole job is to call another service.

> So Netflix expects open source community to pick up the maintenance tab?

Isn’t this the deal with all open source? They are giving something (the code and access to the project) in return for help maintaining it?

No one is being forced to do anything. It is not like there is some open source contributor somewhere now saying, “oh damn, now I have to maintain this, too?”

If people like it and find value in it, they can help contribute to the project in ways they want. Netflix gets to use those contributions, in return for letting people use their contributions. That is just how open source works.

> Isn’t this the deal with all open source?

If Netflix still heavily uses this internally, they should still do the most maintenance. Others contribute based on their own needs.

> So Netflix expects open source community to pick up the maintenance tab ?

I think the notion of open sourcing a project, is you are literally asking at the community for help and that the community will naturally help you with the maintenance.

People want an alternative to things like Temporal, and don't want to handle DAGs with Kafka Streams.

An alternative for a code based workflow like Temporal are Dapr workflows (https://docs.dapr.io/developing-applications/building-blocks...), where you write a set of code based activities into a graph and these can have fan-in, fan-out, sequential patterns etc. Its all code in several supported languages and because Dapr also has building block APIs for pub/sub, service invocation, secrets as well as connecting to underlying infrastructure you can combine workflow with these APIs to build an overall solution.

How scalable is this one? Hated airflow for the scalability issues.

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