davelester

SaaS is a common way for open source companies to create revenue, look no further than WordPress, GitLab, Databricks, DataStax, and many others. Kudos to the opstrace team for taking this path.

There’s nothing inherently dishonest when a company emphasizes their open source strategy. Open source community building is as much about shipping code as it is leading people, and that requires you to be transparent about your intentions. I’ve interpreted opstrace’s release as just that.

I think the concern about neutral project governance is an important one. It’s early days, but from what I’ve seen it seems clear what is being sold vs what is open today. The fact that the project is released under the Apache v2 license means that folks are able to reuse, distribute, and sell the project as they wish — even fork it if they dislike the direction. That said, if governance is a priority for your use I’d definitely look to project in neutral software foundations like the Apache Software Foundation and CNCF.

Re: other high-profile companies using FoundationDB in production, I suggest checking out these two talks from the project's community conference, FoundationDB Summit: Wavefront/VMware[0], and Snowflake Computing[2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M438R4SlTFE

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkeyjFMmIf8

From the post:

FoundationDB Summit is organized on a single track with plenty of time to meet and learn from early adopters, core developers, and other community members. We're also part of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Community Events Day, and will be in the same Washington Convention Center as thousands of other open source engineers that week.

FoundationDB has announced its first community conference, FoundationDB Summit, taking place December 10 in Seattle, WA.

This announcement is via the CNCF blog. FoundationDB.org also published an announcement this morning: https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/announcing-foundationdb-su...

To be clear, Twitter runs Aurora which is open source and has proven itself to be stable, battle-tested, and scalable; development on Aurora began in 2010, and over the years Mesos and Aurora have evolved together. Aurora has cron capabilities built into it, and Twitter does not run Marathon or Chronos.

Twitter engineering recently blogged about Aurora with a bit more on its history: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/all-about-apache-aurora, and The New Stack recently published a two-part article on the project: http://thenewstack.io/twitters-aurora-relates-googles-borg-p..., http://thenewstack.io/twitters-aurora-replaces-operating-sys...

(full disclosure, I work at the tweet shop)

Apache Aurora is a Mesos framework for long-running services and cron jobs, used by companies including Twitter, Foursquare, TellApart, and others.