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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I love how the Planetscale CEO has been shitting on multigres[0], Supabase's equivalent to Neki, and gloating about how superior Neki is, and yet Neki is not even open source!

Sam, it feels like you're just playing games. It's hard to take anything you say or do seriously. Are you going to OSS this thing? Or have you decided to backpedal?

Congrats on the checks notes closed launch, I guess?

0: https://github.com/multigres/multigres

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Every PlanetScale launch seems to come with a side of beef with the competition. Case in point: https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098069474205470970?s=20

Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.

Wow, that thread has bro energy maxed out. Is this normal modern way of communicating for top leaders or i'm getting old?

Sam is always shitting on others. For years he has been screaming how bad PostgreSQL is compared to MySQL. Until getting silent about this topic for a few months and then launching PostgreSQL support. Seems he had to realize than the market for PostgreSQL is too big to ignore.

No it isn’t normal, its just this one person. I don’t personally find this language particularly appealing, especially for a serious discussion on technology. But hey, its a free country, they’re a startup and its one way of grabbing the scarcest of resources: attention.

How does open source have anything to do with Neki's ability to scale against a service that doesn't even do sharding.

They both are characteristics of software that people consider when deciding whether to use it.

Open source being by far the more important of the two, since it means the user is more insulated by terrible corporate decisions thus making it more suitable for long term planning.

have you ever worked for a customer of AWS? If so you have contributed heavily to the destruction of commercial open source.

But your customers are, of course, somehow different? What point are you even trying to make?

Commerical open source is fine. It's nobody else's fault if you raised too much to make it work sustainably.

My customers aren't pretending it's a bad thing that Neki isn't open source.

You've simply chosen not to listen, considering that they've voiced those concerns to me.

A year ago in the initial announcement post you explicitly mentioned open sourcing it.

> When we are ready we will release Neki as an open source project suitable for running the most demanding Postgres workloads.

Has this changed?

They removed that line from the blog post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260516145550/https://planetsca...

https://web.archive.org/web/20260910204345/https://planetsca...

Acknowledging the benifits of keeping a commercial product closed source is one thing, claiming open source has no value is another thing.

Sad to see this coming from a company that was itself built on the foundation of an open-source project like Vitess.

who said open source has no value? I worked at GitHub for 6 years i clearly love open source.

We maintain Vitess using our company funds. Why are you going after a small company for defending itself against companies like Amazon but not criticizing the reason we have to do this.

I would love to open source Neki and I have not said we won't.

See? You're proving my point. All you do is play games. Are you even capable of engaging without confrontation?

I have not in fact, no, despite working 12 years as an SWE.

Unlike you, probably, if we're slinging unfounded accusations.

I've never known in a shorter time that a CEO is too defensive to be a business partner faster.

It is the only reason I come to the comments section of PlanetScale posts on HN.

Their CEO always immediately comes in and makes a fool out of himself. He is what you get when you mix narcissism and being a midwit.

modeling your public relations strategy after matt mullenweg, I see

It's very effective, I'm certainly persuaded to never touch their products.

A remarkable own goal given that if they'd literally held their tongue, I'd be at worst indifferent.

People think comments like this really bother me as if I believe that I've missed out on any dollars at all from you, as if you have the buying power or ability to drive any workloads that would in any way move the needle on my revenue.

I want to let you know that I have customers that pay PlanetScale millions of dollars and have told me they came to the product because of my Twitter account. So you will never make me feel bad about this.

Sure, Jan.

Do they get the same backlash if they went with a source available license similar to MongoDB or Elastic?

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