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OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

blog.openpolicyagent.org

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Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#31

Post by biggestdummy »

sublimino wrote: post #25
abuani wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ControlPlane was able to hire (not acqui-) a few of the FluxCD maintainers and other WeaveWorks staff to continue supporting the project — we did what we could, agree this is better for Styra folk than the uncertainty of closing up shop.

The shop (Styra) did get closed. A few of the most senior maintainers were hired by Apple. Many - including anyone not directly involved in engineering of the OSS product - are now looking for jobs.

Capitalism is ruthless.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#32

Post by biggestdummy »

bitweis wrote: post #26

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?

Not OPA-based , but Kyverno-based. Kyverno is also CNCF, basically an overlap of OPA functionality (with some give and take.)

Nirmata provides commercial/enterprise options around Kyverno.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#33

Post by gneray »

ericand wrote: post #28
bitweis wrote: post #26

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?

Permit.io

they don't actually "support" OPA. more like they run/depend on OPA

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#35

Post by meghan »

Seems similar to Apple's 2015 acquisition of FoundationDB -- they sunset the commercial offering. But it's unclear if they acquired Styra or just hired the team?

I'm maintaining an article about this news (as well as commercial alternatives to OPA) on the Oso blog: https://www.osohq.com/post/opa-maintainers-join-apple-oss-co...

Disclaimer is that I work with Oso :-) but hope it will be helpful regardless.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#36

Post by justincormack »

diggan wrote: post #16
MBCook wrote: post #8

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…

Styra was also a for profit company. The project is part of CNCF though.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#37

Post by goyagoji »

ambentzen wrote: post #15
MBCook wrote: post #8

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.

The nice things about such an obituary is that it isn't a person so we don't have to feel bad and we don't need to know what it was going to do.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#38

Post by johnnyanmac »

traceroute66 wrote: post #24
diggan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And the other side of that coin is ... 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 th…

>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.

I agree. Most people simply won't donate, be it individuals or companies using the tools.

>In the majority they are far more enlightened and open to contributing-back.

Ehh, it's mixed. A few companies won't mind going open source, some "open source", and many "open source but not really". Just having your code readable isn't the FOSS menality, and that's pretty much where the buck stops.

>Finally, regarding the FUD about "oh, its going to be shutdown tomorrow". That road is paved with examples where it DID NOT happen

Suvivor's bias doesn't really feel reassuring here. And just because it's not shut down doesn't mean it won't be subject to corporate rot. That's honestly worst than an honorable death.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#39

Post by johnnyanmac »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #4

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?

1. probably something with AI in it. You got maybe 2-3 years before the bubble pops.

2. branding. cultural awareness can take years or more, and I'm sure coporate knows by now that their brands aren't the best thing to slap onto every scenario. Disney is well learned in this kind of conduct.

3. Because the last thing you want in an aquihire is for all the talent your poaching to jump ship. Some employees may have even worked there previously and used a company to get away from that corporate culture.

So a lot of an aquihire's money tends to go towards golden handcuffs.

Re: OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

#40

Post by rossjudson »

ramoz wrote: post #29
jb1991 wrote: post #3

This is an extremely smart acquisition by Apple, very nice to see.

Can you explain why

At scale, the larger companies end up needing to be able to make policy decisions (read: authn/authz, most of the time) across a large number of "policies" in an efficient way. Everybody starts with simple representations that can go fast but have limited expression, then moves to various forms of extensions/templating/substitution/rules/etc.

OPA and Rego use a datalog variant to bring order to that bespoke mess. Think IAM policy, but you DRY because it's a real programming language with a library full of nice-to-have built-ins.

OPA and Rego can basically "become" other types of access control systems (see https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/comparison-to-other-sys...).

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