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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

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

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> 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.

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 ?

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.

> 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.

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