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Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

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Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#231

Post by imtringued »

jumpconc wrote: post #67
2ndorderthought wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.

The struggles of living in an economic system while completely rejecting that system and pretending it isn't there.

That's actually not the problem. The problem is that the conventional funding model for open source does not make sense and nobody has the resources to provide a financial product that actually works, since the projects with a single maintainer are too small of a market to be worth serving for classic financial institutions like banks.

The business model is as follows: Open source maintenance produces recurring costs (developer salary, infrastructure costs, etc) but these costs are fixed and do not scale with the number of users, only with the development effort. This means the ideal financing structure would be a cost plus system where the maintainer gets paid a salary and the customers (businesses) are spreading the cost among each other so that each business ends up paying less than if they had built or maintained the project in-house.

The problem here is that the costs are variable and depend on the number of participants and their individual willingness to spend money and how that effects the viability of the project as a whole. Participating businesses need some sort of guarantee that they won't be stuck with all of the costs and that there are other participants who will chip in. At the same time, once there is a sufficient number of participants, the participating businesses don't want to overpay. They may commit to a monthly worst case bill of $5000, but if the total bill is $10000 and there are 100 participating businesses so that each business could only pay $100, said big spender would want the option to lower their spending down to $100 if possible and let others carry more of the financial burden.

With this sort of arrangement, funding open source software would be rational, since the amount you save by freeloading is insignificant compared to the risk of the project being discontinued due to freeloading.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#232

Post by indigo945 »

whateveracct wrote: post #192
evertheylen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! But I'm assuming it will prevent me from upgrading to Postgres 19 in the future.

I'm not familiar with the internals, but is backing up that coupled to Postgres version? That feels so brittle to me.

You can of course take a SQL dump that is version-independent, but if you're serious about creating backups, you want to take backups of the actual on-disk format of the WAL, because that's more efficient and also the only practical way to get point-in-time recovery. (For the efficiency, you could alternatively also take ZFS snapshots, which will work independently of the Postgres version, but those also don't give you PITR.) The WAL format is a Postgres implementation detail and therefore tools wanting to read and write it need maintenance whenever the format changes (which can happen on major version releases).

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#235

Post by hosh »

briffle wrote: post #164
hosh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I learned about being a part of an ecosystem: if you want it, you need to support it and help it stay alive. That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.

The project has never even had a donation button on its page, only a link with a few sponsors.

It is not necessarily monetary or even transactional form of support. Reciprocity builds relationships.

Not necessarily even code contributions. It could be professional networking. It is a bit different if the person is not a stranger.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#236

Post by SwellJoe »

artyom wrote: post #213
SwellJoe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effort to setup donations is almost always more trouble than the donations that result are worth. Better spent looking for a job, or working on a commercial project that will make money. People simply don't donate to open source projects at a level that matters. I've been working on Open Source software for 30+ years. There's no money in it, if your idea for making money is "accept donations". I don't like it, bu…

Second this. There's no money in donations. Also the target demographics for donations is individuals, who rarely donate and are kind of desensitized to the whole thing at this stage (as everyone and their mother asks for donations). Companies need to jump through legal and accounting loopholes to donate, they very much prefer a simple purchase, which is nice! But setting up actual purchases is a whole different orde…

The most annoying thing is the people who demand most loudly that you setup donations don't actually donate once you go to the trouble to do so. We had a guy make an issue about it in github, and followed up over and over...we finally did it. Nothing. I guess they think making demands is helping.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#237

Post by Chris2048 »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #202
Chris2048 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a third party 'productising' FOSS be acceptable to the FOSS community? for example, adding support, bug fixes, corp-friendly licencing and pricing models, private code/package repos, code/package signing, etc. Providing biz ppl to be available for meetings, legal protection, PII, etc. To foster goodwill, they could even send some of the profit back to the original maintainer, ala pikapods: https://news.ycombina…

I'm not suggesting productizing but if someone skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses and gave me the rest without me having to do anything I would be happy with that. I think the important thing would be, customers would likely expect less support so licenses should be cheaper. People who don't want tiered licenses could definitely just mit it and walk away of course. I do like the idea of paying back th…

> skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses

What do you mean by this? A FOSS product that has a paid packaged version?

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#238

Post by marcus_holmes »

freakynit wrote: post #228
marcus_holmes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was that this is a company that is willing to pay for the work, but corporate procurement doesn't work like that. If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive p…

Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?

I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions.

One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departments negotiate/demand looong invoice payment deadlines).

That still leaves more problems - like the sales cycle, it can take two years or more for a large corp to go from an "we want to buy this" from a department head to an actual purchase order from procurement. You could short-cut that if you were already an approved supplier, and had a team who knew the process and could respond much more quickly to the insane amount of bureaucracy involved.

You'd need to be large (large corps hate buying from small companies), well-funded (so there's no argument that you'll run out of funds, or not be able to compensate them if something goes wrong), heavily insured (see above), with a team who knows their way around everything that a large procurement department could throw at you. You could pro-actively try getting on the approved suppliers list for every large corp in a sector, and then advertise your services to OSS/startups/small corps, who would be your customer.

Not stupid, certainly. I've heard worse ideas ;)

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#239

Post by freakynit »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #238
freakynit wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?

I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions. One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departme…

Dayuum!!! I guess then we should focus only on making that "pay something to this OSS developer" easy.. everything else still stays the same... no guarantees, no offloaded liabilities, no expedited timelines, etc.
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