Your unique advantage is you know Vitess super well. Your unique disadvantage is you know Vitess super well! Second system syndrome is real. Using as much Vitess as possible could help you guard against it.
This is so cool. A key benefit is that it's not embedding the C Lua runtime and compiler, but rather implements Lua in the host language (Elixir/Erlang).
When sandboxing user code in another runtime, you need to serialize the data to and from that runtime. That comes with a performance penalty.
So, for example, if you sandbox code in WASM, you need to pick a transport data format, like JSON. You need to serialize Elixir data structures into JSON, send it to WASM, and then deserialize the result. For a high-performance data pipeline, this adds up!
But if your sandbox is in the host language, no serialization/de-serialization is required. You can execute the sandboxed language in microseconds.
Sequin | Platform Engineer | San Francisco | ONSITE
We're building the world's fastest change data capture (CDC) platform for Postgres. CDC is a proven pattern that enables real-time use cases like triggering side effects, fanning out events, caching at the edge, and audit logging - but existing solutions are notoriously difficult to set up and maintain.
We're making CDC easy enough for weekend projects yet robust enough for Fortune 500 companies.
Sequin engineer here. We'll publish our benchmark repo soon! Indeed, we're still doing a lot of fiddling with Debezium ourselves to make sure we cover different configurations, deployments, etc.
The main thing we want to communicate is that we're able to keep up with workloads Debezium can handle.
(And, re: RabbitMQ, I wouldn't write off a platform based on a single application built on that platform :) )
Sequin | Platform Engineer | San Francisco | ONSITE
We're building the world's fastest change data capture (CDC) platform for Postgres. CDC is a proven pattern that enables real-time use cases like triggering side effects, fanning out events, caching at the edge, and audit logging - but existing solutions are notoriously difficult to set up and maintain.
We're making CDC easy enough for weekend projects yet robust enough for Fortune 500 companies.
AFAIK, the reason for these changes is basically "prevent AWS from eating our business". Is that right?
If so, are these trends harmful to open source? Are we not choosing between:
1. A world where all revenue in OSS infrastructure ultimately flows to a few big platform companies.
2. A world where these carve-outs are commonplace.
Meta's carve-out with Llama is so interesting because it practically calls the big companies out by name. Should there be a similar standard license for open source infrastructure?
> Should there be a similar standard license for open source infrastructure?
Yes, I think there should be. The tech world is basically a monopoly at this point, and that's dangerous for a thousand reasons. The least those monopoly owners can do is financially contribute if they want to use these tools.
It's sad to me that the tech world is rallying around Valkey, which is Big Tech's fork: AWS et al are the ones behind it. We continue to give more and more power to the biggest players.
Affero GPL-style copyleft licenses are an option, although they are treated as radioactive by most companies. A clause that triggers the extensions over GPL only for companies beyond a certain size might make them more platable.
AFAIK, the main issue of the GPL family of licenses is that they are rather poorly drafted. The GNU project has great evangelists but ideological-minded people make bad lawyers. Their licenses are long winded and hard to interpret, and often make assumptions about unsettled bits of copyright law. Their legal theories (eg. "GPL is not a contract") have been rejected by courts.
In short, if you're a company wanting to use some AGPL-like license, you'd probably want to use a license that's better drafted over the original AGPL.
If it gets to court you've got a plaintiff either claiming that defendant violated copyright or the defendant failed to follow the terms of GPL.
In both cases the defendant will respond that they followed the terms of GPL.
In both cases the court has to determine what the license means and then whether or not defendant followed the terms of the GPL. To do that the court has to decide what those terms actually mean.
For that I don't think it matters if GPL is considered to be a "contract" or "license" because as far as I have been able to tell the rules of interpretation are the same no matter how you characterize the document.
Maybe it could make a difference in the remedies that are available if plaintiff wins. If it is seen as not being a contract then it might be that the only remedies would be those under copyright law. Those would generally be an injunction ordering defendant to stop infringing and monetary damages. Actual monetary damages would be near zero so plaintiff would probably ask for statutory damages.
If it is seen as being a contract then potentially the remedy could include an order that the defendant release their source code. If the GPL infringement was distributing binaries without making source available this would probably be the remedy plaintiff wants.
Ordering the defendant to obey the terms of the contract is called "specific performance" and I believe is usually disfavored by courts if monetary damages are sufficient but since infringing GPL generally doesn't cause any monetary losses to the copyright owner and the whole point of the contract was to make source available I'd expect a decent chance plaintiff could get specific performance.
Note that this means that it is actually better for GPL to be seen as a contract.
That the GPL is a contract hardly came as any surprise to people familiar with the law. Lawyers and judges view any collection of terms as a contract, and tear-open licenses are the norm these days. But the FSF had its own reasons to say it’s a license, reasons that might be more important to the philosophy of Free Software than the court.
Contracts require consent between two parties who join in the contract, if they are to be enforced. The GPL (and many other licenses that come with products) doesn’t have a signature page, so there is no explicit consent. If there is consent at all, it’s the implied consent that has become standard for “tear-open” licenses. Your acceptance of the license is indicated by some action, in this case integrating the code into your product.
The default under copyright law is all rights reserved, which means “you can’t do anything with this” with some minor exceptions that are called “fair use”. Thus, if you integrate the software into your product, distribute it, or perform some other action that is restricted by copyright, you must have accepted the license because your alternative would be all rights reserved. Thus, the FSF asserts that the GPL is a license because they feel consent isn’t really necessary, they don’t want to argue about consent in court, and they believe that they can do all of the enforcement they need using a complaint of copyright infringement. Also, tear-open licenses were a much more foggy issue in law when the GPL came about. And then there’s the philosophical matter:
Historically collecting damages were not the goal of GPL enforcement. Specific performance, or stop infringement by no longer distributing the software were the remedies. The latter is not always an option for the infringing party, and that's what submits them into compliance.
I think it comes down to the initial choice to make something open source. At that point you're well aware that big companies might use your code and profit more than you ever will. If you don't want that, don't open source and they will never use your code.
It's having your cake and eating it when you get popular by being open source and then add restrictions when you have success.
I think there should be a change to licenses where the trademark is tied to the license. You can go proprietary but you can't take back the name.
What is wrong with a non-commercial open source license for those that want to use your software for personal use and a paided up commercial license (something like Business Source License[1]) for the big tech corporations of the world?
How much open source software is being incorporated into closed source software and then being resold back to the original open source developers - to get an idea, check the licenses on a Apple phone (Settings -> General -> Legal & Regulatory -> Legal Notices)[2]. It's the who's who of open source licenses! I wonder how much Apple has contributed to those projects? Perhaps each FOSS developer mentioned there should receive - at least - a free iPhone ...
The argument of "social contract" or "moral rights" or whatever else a FOSS developer faces when changing their license to something that prevents BigTech making money off their work is unfair and unnecessary. Its their work, their choice. Just as politicians aren't held to the promises they made yesterday, so too are FOSS developers human and can change their direction/mind and license.
In addition to this, many have vested interests in these companies continuing their use of "free" (in the sense of money) software since they are themselves shareholders or employees. License fees effect the bottom line of those corporations. Imagine AWS paying a license fee for their Linux boxes ...
A corporation also has a "social contract" to fulfil, yet its the FOSS developer that needs to fulfil theirs first. Or perhaps a corporation only faces "legal contract" and for the sake of profit, a "social contract" isn't applicable to a corporation. In which case, neither should a "social contract" be applicable to a FOSS developer - when dealing with corporations.
We just applied this framework to the Sequin [1] docs two weeks ago. It has felt so nice to have a framework. I think our docs flow really well now, and it's been easier for us to add and maintain docs because we know where to put things.
The slightly ironic part is that the Diataxis docs themselves are a bit obtuse. It's a little verbose. So it took a couple passes for it all to click.
The analogy I gave my team that was helpful for everyone's understanding:
Imagine you're shopping for a piece of cooking equipment, like a pressure cooker.
The first thing you're going to look at is the "quickstart" (tutorial) – how does this thing work generally? You just want to see it go from A to B.
Then, you're going to wonder how to use it to cook a particular dish you like. That's a how-to.
If you're really curious about anything you've seen so far, then you'll flip to the reference to read more about it. For example, you might check the exact minutes needed for different types of beans.
And finally, when you're really invested in pressure cooking and want to understand the science behind it - why pressure affects cooking times, how the safety mechanisms work, etc. - that's when you'll read the explanatory content.
Comically, our docs were completely backwards: we lead with explanation ("How Sequin Works"). I think that's the natural impulse of an engineer: let me tell you how this thing works and why we built it this way so you can develop a mental model. Then you'll surely get it, right?
While that may be technically accurate, a person doesn't have the time or patience for that. You need to ramp them into your world. The quickstart -> how-to -> reference flow is a great way to do that. Then if you really have their attention, you can galvanize them about your approach with explanatory material.
I checked out your docs, and I agree that they flow very nicely! So often it seems that docs are either frustratingly vague to the point where it almost seems like the company is embarrassed to admit that their tool is a tool and not a "transformative synergy experience" (or similar nonsense), or docs immediately get overly specific without covering "why this product exists".
Minor note: The only thing in your docs that made me pause was the repeated use of "CDC", which I had to google the definition of. (For context, I have implemented "CDC" several times in my career, but wasn't familiar with the acronym)
In case you weren't already aware, most markdown parsers support actual HTML tags in it, and there's <abbr title="change data capture">CDC</abbr> that allows being visually succinct, is a11y friendly, and in most browsers is visually distinct to prompt the user there's more content hidden in the hover or long-press
I think having those four approaches is the key thing and you’re addressing it well. The flow is really the readers choice. My brain works in the way of wanting the overall explanation first. Then I seek the how-tos and tutorials.
Out of order does not cause a reset. Some networks with unstable topologies like wireless meshes frequently cause reordering and it doesn’t destroy TCP streams. It usually just results in inefficient retransmits when the receiver registers it as a drop.
> For example, imagine when a worker processes a message, it performs
> a side effect like sending an email. It very well could receive the
> message, send the email, but then due to a network error fail to
> acknowledge the message.
Since we are now deeply in "explaining the joke"-territory: in this reply I am pretending to be a message queue implementation that never receives the ack from a receiver. Counting the vast number of upvotes on the comment, at least one other person was deligthed by this chain of replies with the subtext being apparent. I have also found your parent comment worthy of a sensible chuckle for the same reason.
> the WordPress logo is prominently displayed next to the "WP Engine" title
Pretty sure that Wordpress logo is just the stock logo that came with every Wordpress installation. The name wp engine was the website name of that Wordpress installation.
Excited to follow your progress :)
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