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VC backed database company with a CLA on their "open source" project. Red flag. Is there a community fork yet?
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TiKV the Core Storage scalable component is a CNCF graduated projected. PingCAP cannot change the license even if it wanted to.
Thanks for the info! I wasn't aware of this and didn't see any mention of this in their github docs. It means that at least you can use that part of the project without worry. They should promote this aspect of the project more prominently. It should be of great interest to anyone thinking about adopting the technology. Do you have any links to the Core Storage CNCF project? I couldn't find it on the CNCF website und…
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How would you fund the open source development of a database? TiDB is Apache licensed, that should be enough no? Because if we ban all projects from VC-backed startups, you're going to clear your tech stack pretty quickly.
I think the concern is that the company would relicense future versions, as allowed by the CLA, under pressure from VCs.
I'm afraid that they can always do that with or without a CLA. Apache is quite a permissive license.
VC backed database company with a CLA on their "open source" project. Red flag. Is there a community fork yet?
CLAs are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, they are pretty much necessary for software companies. We have one for our open source projects. It has language to ensure there's no dispute about our right to the code. That's important, because we indemnify our customers against IP infringement. It's a standard part of contracts for software and services.
A popular more lightweight solution is the DCO[0].
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How would you fund the open source development of a database? TiDB is Apache licensed, that should be enough no? Because if we ban all projects from VC-backed startups, you're going to clear your tech stack pretty quickly.
> How would you fund the open source development of a database? I think the best way would be something similar to the Linux Foundation. Companies in need of a certain type of database would pool resources to develop and maintain it. PostgreSQL was a community developed database that was funded in something approaching this way as most of the developers were either students or worked for someone who paid them while t…
Disclaimer: I currently work at PingCAP and previously worked at the Linux Foundation.
Foundation (whether it's the LF or others) isn't a panacea either. It's fine when projects get started and there are plenty of willing member companies, but for many projects, companies often lose interest, need to cut down on open source related investments, etc. and the project funding dwindles. The reality is that the member companies need to both fund and provide software developers for projects, and it's difficult to expect them to keep the same commitment for more than a few years these days....
TiDB is 8 years old now; what's new?
Yeah that and the actual core storage engine is a key-value store library called https://github.com/tikv/tikv which is written in Rust. I suspect the Go part only handles the replication component, MVCC, query planner, server etc.
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Thanks for the info! I wasn't aware of this and didn't see any mention of this in their github docs. It means that at least you can use that part of the project without worry. They should promote this aspect of the project more prominently. It should be of great interest to anyone thinking about adopting the technology. Do you have any links to the Core Storage CNCF project? I couldn't find it on the CNCF website und…
If you’re looking for the TiKV project link: https://github.com/tikv/tikv
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"every significant company"? i'd say most of them just use postgres or mysql and scale fine.
If you look at DB-engines.com/ranking and look at all of the collective interest in all of the databases listed, you will see that the aggregate "score" of all databases combined 7105.84. Postgres is indeed popular; but it is only ranked 4th on the list, with its own score of 648.96. MySQL currently is still 50% larger in terms of interest, with a score of 998.15. Which means interest in Postgres (specifically) is on…
I’m not saying it fixes everything, but knowing how a DB works, and applying proper data modeling and normalization could severely reduce the size of many datasets.
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They claimed they successfully onboarded a customer with 1 PB of data at KubeCon NA. I have strong doubts about distributed DBs in general, but I also can’t see them blatantly lying in a talk.
TiDB is running core banking services too. I think people’s idea of scale and operating at scale is limited to their experience. You can get MySQL to run at any scale, look at Meta and Shopify. Operational complexity at that scale is a different story. Distributed databases reduce a lot of the operational complexity. To take one example: Try a DDL on a 5 TB table in any replicated MySQL topology of choice and compare…
That’s a new one to me; never have I ever heard someone claim that making a system distributed reduces complexity.
I’ve operated EDB’s Distributed Postgres at a decent scale (< 100 TB of unique data); in no way did it enable reduced complexity. For the devs, maybe – “chuck whatever data you want wherever you want, it’ll show up.” But for Ops? Absolutely not, it was a nightmare.
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I think the concern is that the company would relicense future versions, as allowed by the CLA, under pressure from VCs.
Open software licenses are generally non-revokable (unless you violate them). They can only change the license of future versions. I'm afraid that they can always do that with or without a CLA. Apache is quite a permissive license.
So if I make a contribution under some very restrictive license, but sign a CLA allowing relicensing, all bets for the future are off.