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Based on Apple's acquisition of FoundationDB, this seems like it will have negative consequences for public development of OPA. What are the counterexamples, where Apple acquiring a project results in it being more open with sustained development?
FoundationDB wasn't even Open Source when Apple acquired them.
Isn't Styra like a company of like 50-100 people? Seems like it'd be a bummer to be an employee at the company that gets left behind.
Based on Apple's acquisition of FoundationDB, this seems like it will have negative consequences for public development of OPA. What are the counterexamples, where Apple acquiring a project results in it being more open with sustained development?
From this announcement, they are going to open source the enterprise version of this tool, which was also previously closed source.
This is a very well written announcement. It immediately defines OPA (for people like me who don’t immediately recognize it). It says what’s not changing for people, and says where things will go. Congratulations to the team.
> It says what’s not changing for people For the people who are currently experiencing the first time a project they heavily used gets acquired by a for-profit company, it's worth remembering that everything written is "As it stands currently", which can change at any time. It wouldn't be the first time the founders/company/project said "Nothing will change now when we got acquired" only for it to shutdown/change dra…
Lots of FOSS maintainers are happy to bitch and moan about how they are doing god's work for little or no remuneration. They are of course, quite correct to do so, it is indeed hard work, long hours, poor or no pay.
But, and its a big BUT .... you can put all the donation, crowdfunding buttons that you like on your GitHub page. The reality is that will only get you so far.
So there is a lot to be said for corporations that recognise the work and are willing to pay an old-school salary to the maintainers. It provides life-stability for the maintainers, and it provides product-stability for the corporation ... win-win.
And in 2025 the reality is that corporation thinking on open-source is a far cry of what it was back-then. In the majority they are far more enlightened and open to contributing-back.
Yes it will never be sufficient for the die-hard FOSS greybeards. But even a billion dollar corporation cannot possibly put dollars behind every single tiny piece of open-source software it ever uses. You have to pick-and-choose, its just the reality of life.
Finally, regarding the FUD about "oh, its going to be shutdown tomorrow". That road is paved with examples where it DID NOT happen ... I seem to recall that the usual suspects (Redhat / Canonical / IBM etc.) all employ a great deal of maintainers of various critical parts of Linux. As far as I can tell the output of those maintainers taking the corporate dime has neither suffered or been shutdown.
Isn't Styra like a company of like 50-100 people? Seems like it'd be a bummer to be an employee at the company that gets left behind.
A counter example would be Weaveworks(folks behind Flux/FluxCD and many other widely used oss tools). I'm sure the ex employees would've preferred to get acquihired vs closing up for good. I highly doubt Styra was pulling in enough money to fund their business, and the days of zirp are long gone, so I doubt they would've been able to raise another round to keep the lights on for another few years.
Has anyone seen more options?
This is a very well written announcement. It immediately defines OPA (for people like me who don’t immediately recognize it). It says what’s not changing for people, and says where things will go. Congratulations to the team.
I was left with the somewhat opposite feeling. I still don’t know what OPA actually is or does. It has a nice paragraph describing it without saying anything at all.
Looking again, I see your point. If you don’t know what it is having the acronym spelled out doesn’t help much at all.
Still it clears the low bar provided by those announcements that just say something like:
“BEOTZ’s developers are joining Flmp.io. As well all know BEOTZ is popular and Flmp.io is a top provider to enterprises. We look forward to exciting things coming soon.”
With Both Aserto and Styra gone - there aren't any commerical/enterprise options to get capabilities and support around OPA. Has anyone seen more options?
This is an extremely smart acquisition by Apple, very nice to see.
1. Any idea on what should I start next so that I can get acquihired? 2. It looks like Apple didn't get much 'ownership' of OPA in this case, what was the point of purchasing the company as a whole versus simply offering these 3 employees generous sign-on bonuses? 3. Why is it that companies generally tend to pay a lot more per employee in an acquihire scenario?
In other words, the scenarios I've seen if the acquired company is not doing well the acquirer pays off the investors and gives the employees a small bonus contingent on staying for 1+ years and hitting goals. It's not necessarily a crazy windfall.