Comment by saadn92
19 hours ago
The Crunchy Data part is what people should pay more attention to here. He had corporate sponsorship and it was working. Company got acquired, new owners didn't prioritize the same things, and now 3.8k-star critical infrastructure goes dark. Your backup tool's funding depended on someone else's M&A strategy and you had no idea.
I've been gradually moving my own stuff to SQLite and git-tracked files partly because of this. Every managed Postgres setup has a dependency tree of tools maintained by people whose funding situation you know nothing about.
It didn't go dark, and doesn't seem that critical in general.
General idea still stands, but it is not like this just disappeared and backups will stop working.
The favourite model I've seen is the main branch is free, licensed MIT or whatever, but if you want release artifacts that are tested - then you pay for it. You can always compile your own.
Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?
SQLite doesn’t depend on donations. They have a consortium, sell licenses (it is open source but some companies like the explicit CYA), sell support contracts, sell an aviation-grade test harness, and sell extensions.
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).
They don't make much off this, its known.
Is there a reason why more OSS projects don't follow this model? It sounds like you are saying that there are clear advantages here that other OSS projects lack.
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pgbackrest also was part of an organization from what I understood from the post. The organization got acquired. I don't see how sqlite is shielded (or any project really). They could get acquired. They could not have enough customers. They could go the wrong directions and lose customers. They might have a few high profile bugs so that customers lose faith in them.
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Its an LLM comment, don't search too deeply for logical consistency
They have more sponsors/clients so a single company changing direction wouldn't kill them. They also sell directly if you want to buy from them. But ultimately the risk still exists.
Because it's a single file you can back up like any other?
I interpreted it as the problem being that the technology may end up unsupported. I mean you can also keep using pgbackrest now. It's not like the code is gone.
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