Show HN: OpenSnowcat – A fork of Snowplow to keep open analytics alive | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OpenSnowcat – A fork of Snowplow to keep open analytics alive

opensnowcat.io

77 pointsjoaocorreia18 comments

I’ve been a long-time Snowplow user and unofficial evangelizer. I have deep respect for its founders, Alex and Yali, who I met a few times.

What made me fall in love with Snowplow was that it was unopinionated, gave access to raw event data, and was truly open source. Back in 2013, that changed everything for me. I couldn’t look at GA the same way again.

Over the years, analytics moved into SQL warehouses driven by cheaper CPU/storage, dbt, reproducibility, and transparency. I saw the need for a democratized Snowplow pipeline and launched a hosted version in 2019.

In January 2024, Snowplow changed its license (SLULA), effectively ending open-source Snowplow by restricting production use. When that happened, I realized the spirit of open data and open architecture was gone.

A week later, I forked it, I wanted to keep the idea alive.

OpenSnowcat keeps the original collector and enricher under Apache 2.0 and stays fully compatible with existing Snowplow pipelines. We maintain it with regular patches, performance optimizations, and integrations with modern tools like Warpstream Bento for event processing/routing.

The goal is simple: keep open analytics open.

Would love to hear how others in the community think we can preserve openness in data infrastructure as “open source” becomes increasingly commercialized.

That's it, I should have posted here earlier but now felt right.

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I understand that being a fork of Snowplow is how you define yourself, but there's actually nothing on the webpage that provides any detail of what the product does, other than "event pipeline" right up the top.

I suggest putting at least some content on the website about what you do so that people can find you when looking for solutions in the industry, rather than having them adopt Snowplow and then splinter off later. I understand that your main focus is snowcatcloud.com which does have info putting some on opensnowcat.io will greatly enhance its discoverability.

Especially as the splinter strategy is going to become increasingly harder as people who care about open source won't adopt Snowplow to begin with, and people who don't care won't leave it.

Thank you! Agree! A section "What it is" and "What you can use it for" will be helpful to showcase when and why you would use it!.

Every time I see a bait and switch like this, I'm thinking for myself "well, this could have been easily covered by AGPL...if they were actually interested in keeping it Open Source".

Oftentimes the company is worried about not being able to make revenue by providing hosted services, which is fair and I understand it. But please if you do this, don't do a bait and switch like this. Relicense it as AGPL which covers hosted services just the same as GPL would cover binary builds.

Anyways, thank you very much for this. As a former early adopter of snowplow in my infrastructure I really appreciate the fork and its new life!

Interesting post, minor note on the homepage: The first two boxes for "Trusted by" above software.com are shown as empty for me.

Browser is Firefox on Android, tested without adblocker

thanks will check!

I genuinely thought software.com was like a lorem ipsum placeholder (particularly in the context of the other two being blank). Went to the site ... it feels even more like a fake company. There is so much here but it all feels like an empty shell?

Hahaha no software.com is a real company, and they do use opensnowcat!

Fixed! Thank you!

It's not immediately apparent from your website what opensnowcat actually does.

Yes, I guess I've been so deep I never worked on actually making that clear. I'm working on adding a section about it with specific use cases! Thank you!

Github project: https://github.com/opensnowcat

Bookmarked this. Previously used Mautic, but this seems more interesting.

I was just wondering how there seemed to be so few tag libraries.

Opensnowcat works with Snowplow's or Segment SDKs, this is an interesting observation, we could easily expand!

Big fan of what you're doing Joao! Keep up the great work :)

Thank you Taylor!

Love this, will take a look. Good luck on your open source journey.

Thank you!

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