Supabase’s playbook is to replicate existing products and open source projects, release them under open source, and monetize the adoption. They’ve repeated this approach across multiple offerings. With AI, the replication process becomes even faster, though it risks producing low-quality imitations that alienate the broader community and people will resent the stealing of their work.
> our technological choices are quite different; everything we use is open source; and wherever possible, we use and support existing tools rather than developing from scratch.
I understand that people get frustrated when there is any commercial interest associated to open source. But someone needs to fund open source efforts and we’re doing our best here. Some (perhaps non-obvious) examples
* we employ the maintainers of PostgREST, contributing directly to the project - not some private fork
* we employ maintainers of Postgres, contributing patches directly
* we have purchased and open sourced private companies, like OrioleDB, open sourced the code and made the patents freely available to everyone
* we picked up unmaintained tools and maintained them at our own cost, like the Auth server, which we upstreamed until the previous owner/company stopped accepting contributions
* we worked with open source tools/standards like TUS to contribute missing functionality like Postgres support and advisory locks
* we have sponsored adjacent open source initiatives like adding types to Elixir
* we have given equity to framework creators, which I’m certain will be the largest donation that these creators have (and will) ever receive for their open source work
* and yes, we employ the maintainers of Vitess to create a similar offering for the Postgres ecosystem under the same Apache2 license
Postgres has a pretty permissive license, but that doesn't mean you can just ignore it.