Why open source always wins
Open source software ate the world.
Most tools we use on a daily basis are built in the open. The core team works for a company, while a bunch of people from the internet donate their time and effort to a project they like.
To an outside observer, it’s not immediately clear why this works. Why groups, who often never meet, build amazing projects like Postgres, Zed, Firefox or Linux, and seemingly get nothing in return?
The answer is straightforward. Engineers care. Great engineers care a lot.
What’s mine is yours
Our industry has a saying: code that nobody complains about is code nobody uses.
With closed source software, complaining is pretty much all you can do. You can email them, blast them on Twitter or ask your boss to cancel their contract, but the decision to fix an issue is out of your hands.
Next to an empty coffee pot, that’s the most frustrating experience an engineer can go through. All of our intelligence, grit and curiosity reduced to an ignored support ticket.
Open source software is different. Whenever something is broken, an engineer can fix it. And if enough people think the same way, that change can be merged upstream and become the new norm.
Popular open source projects are built better, and faster, powered by our annoyance and determination to make the problems we care about go away.
It’s not the most romantic description of a community that collaborates for the greater good, but I suspect it’s pretty close. Engineers only fix problems we care about, and problems a lot of us care about get fixed faster.
The end result is good software, which also happens to be free.
Shoulders of giants
Engineers take a lot of pride in our work. After all, it takes a lot of it to build good software.
However, most of what we do on a daily basis is a concrete representation of some general problem, solved in a college dorm 50 years ago.
For example, behind the 100k+ lines of complex code, PgDog is basically a SQL parser with a hash table. Sure, there is a bit more to it, and that’s why we’ve been working on it full time for almost two years, but we didn’t invent the wheel here.
We took a few well-known concepts and welded them together, with Rust, to solve several problems, all at once.
The value of software doesn’t come from code. It comes from:
- Our determination to make the code work well
- Our willingness to take responsibility when it doesn’t
This is why, to me, closed source software makes very little sense. The code, or even the solution, are not that valuable. Especially these days, when we have access to cheap LLMs that can write a lot of it in a few weeks.
This is also why I don’t lose sleep every time OpenAI releases a better model, or yet another “SaaS is dead” meme hits my LinkedIn feed.
AI can’t take ownership of software. Only companies built by people can.
Open source software has more people that care. It’s built by its users who interact with it on a daily basis. Often enough, users make the best developers.
They not only care the most, but they also know the most about the problem space. And that’s really tough to compete with, no matter how many talented engineers you can hire.
Making money
The most common question we get when talking to potential investors and teammates is: if we give PgDog away for free, how do we build a business?
PgDog is mission-critical software and it solves a real problem. Companies that provide guarantees to their customers also expect one from their vendors.
We provide that guarantee. When something goes wrong with your PgDog deployment, we are there to fix it. And it’s really that simple.
The meaning of free in “free and open source” is often misunderstood. It’s free as in freedom to use and make your own choices. It’s not free beer1.
It costs a lot of money to build and even more money to operate code.
Engineers who use free software know this sometimes unspoken rule: if you deploy it, you own it.
You can create a GitHub issue and hope it gets resolved by a generous stranger but, at the end of the day, you are on the hook to make sure that it does.
If your team buys our Enterprise edition, you’re off and we’re on, with a guaranteed 15 minute SLA.
This is why PgDog is free and open source and isn’t going anywhere. We are a group of smart, motivated, and overcaffeinated engineers who believe we can solve this problem.
And more importantly, we care a lot.
For the love of the game, and because we have 16 million smart and motivated engineers willing to lend a hand.
About us
PgDog is sharding Postgres. We are a San Francisco-based startup, looking to hire our 5th founding engineer. Ping us on Discord or email [email protected].