Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.

General idea still stands, but it is not like this just disappeared and backups will stop working.

Sad to see competitor go, I think there's lots of room for improvement here, & C over Golang is particularly nice when postgres wants to run on system without overcommit

That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.

Obviously, all contributors have some form of copyright, which may or may not have been waived depending on whether there was an ACL in place and jurisdiction. So he would need to get permission from the copyright holders, maybe in exchange for a percentage of the profit.

But it's MIT license. We can open a company tomorrow, take that code, and start selling it. Further development and improvements of the code could be trivially done openly or behind closed doors. FWIW the author themselves could do that if they wanted.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

https://github.com/aiven-open/pghoard seems like a good option too, but I haven’t tested it yet to have a solid opinion.

Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.

I understand that this might not fully be in the spirit of open-source, but, what's happening currently is way worse.. where giant companies rip off the hardwork of open-source software maintainers without compsensating them adequately.

Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?

This is the curse of OSS.

3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.

Why is it never the responsibility of the people using it?

If anyone cares enough they will. People didn’t care enough to pay, so maybe no one cares enough to fork and be the new unpaid custodian

If no one cared enough to support the project, why does anyone care enough now? It all sounds hollow. Nothing bitter about it.

When you work on a project, any project, you have a responsibility. At some point we all can stop, and become free to not have that responsibility.

Bailey: maintaining a popular project is not that much work.

What?

Too complicated. Make it GPL (not MIT) and offer dual licensing.

Those corps that need it but are GPL-phobic can have a different license, and can pay for it.

He was paid to work on it. That stopped, he continued to work on it in the hopes he could find someone who would hire him to work on it.

That wasn’t true, no one has funded it.

So due to the economic system he no longer maintains it.

That’s your economic system at work. No one is pretending it isn’t there, this is the outcome of it

> This is the curse of OSS.

There are examples of failing forks. And there are examples of forks that became better than the original. It is not possible to generalize this into one or the other solely via a curse-of-OSS conclusion. Funding will always be an issue; but funding is not necessarily the main or only criterium as to whether a project fails or succeeds.

Not the fact that he made the decision he made.

A fair amount of people work here at orgs on here would absolutely be able to swing couple of hundred bucks per month in sponsorship or licensing or donations for a critical tool in their infra toolkit without lot of effort.

Particularly so, with the rising frequency of AI deleted my prod posts.

The alternative to this seemingly bitter approach is handing over the trust they built to some unknown person who can do whatever they want with the data in a lot of PostgreSQL databases around the world. I think I prefer the bitterness here over blind trust.

yes

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921198 for start

My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.

Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.

It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either homebrew types and the other commercial industry that will likely require some more integrations and customization.

Of course there is always the risk it goes out of business like any other company, but it’s not funded like your typical small open source project and doesn’t even allow open contributions (not necessarily a bad thing IMO but it’s just a totally different type of project).

With WAL archiving you need to wait for a WAL segment to finish before it's backed up. With streaming backups the deadtime is minimized. At least that's as far as I understand this, I didn't get to try this out in practice yet.

No, it's not. You can still contact the author and ask them to transfer the name to you.

I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.

I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.

“And many programmers, they say to me, “The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.” It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. So, really, they're in no danger.”

- Richard Stallman in 2001 admitting his ideology can’t explain how a programmer can eat

In my opinion, though this is HN heresy, the free software ideology and ethos was naïve, utopian, and clueless about how power works, from day 1. His dream is literally structurally impossible, capitalism or no capitalism, so long as humans need money to eat.

I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.

On top of that, for availability (and minimizing deadtime), we have 2 replicas using streaming replication. If the lead PG crashes, one of the replicas is promoted to lead (and starts accepting writes), and we "only" lose the writes that haven't been sent over the streaming replication.

You can fully eliminate that window of data loss with synchronous replication (vs the default asynchronous replication - which we use). The write slowdown (replica network round trip + 2nd write at replica) isn't worth it for us

The reason for something to exist is someone finds joy doing it. Especially when they are unpaid.

The sadness should be focused on his inability to support himself with a tool that clearly a lot of companies, and people are using and gaining value for.

Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?

And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.

Some who are opposed to capitalism seem to think that anyone who wants to trade their talents and hard work for more than the minimum, are exploiting anyone who wants or needs their product.

September 26th, 1983:

"Dear Mr. Stallman, it is I, gjsman-1000, a time-traveler sent back to tell you to rethink your upcoming GNU project because you are currently clueless about how power works. Yes, you may be able to code up an impressive prototype compiler and revise it until your fingers bleed. Yes, a decade later some zealous followers may follow your lead and maintain it on the bleeding edge. Yes, two decades later others will perhaps start an open source compiler project to wrest control from your successful compiler that is largely maintained without your direct input. And yes, three decades later your compiler team may even merge in new features and improvements that came from the other compiler. But heed my ominous warning: four decades later I will not be able to remember my original point, for time travel is dangerous business and has adverse effects on short and long term memory."

I am an active open source contributor.

I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?

It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".

Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.

As long as they keep releasing sources of their own modifications -if they ever do any-, the rest is fair play.

See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

Not all open source licenses are copyleft licenses (e.g., MIT very much isn’t), but at the very least copyleft licenses make it much harder to exploit open source code commercially without giving back in some way, whether that’s code, or cash for a commercial license.

Not perfect, by any means, but definitely an improvement over more permissive licenses.

I am aware of how much I’m starting to sound a bit like RMS in my old age.

In this case the provider would of course have to comply with the AGPL and release their modifications as you mention, but it's important to note that No FOSS license protects at all against, for example, just offering the code as a service. It's the exact reason why Mongodb changed licenses and then a stream of commercial products started to change into "Source-Available" licenses in the recent past.