Just like any other day, I saw a funny tweet across my timeline this morning:
Open Source, except when the business disappears they delete all their repos. pic.twitter.com/OmsQ3JCztC
— Miss Witch (@evilgaywitch) March 24, 2015
Not sure if you heard the news, but FoundationDB was a company with a decent amount of open source projects around a NoSQL database. They recently were bought by a much larger company and decided to close down the project, including removing the source and binaries from distribution channels.
@mappingbabel This is why I don't trust non-open governance OSS. Yes, this is where benevolent dictator (person/company) fails.
— Milind Bhandarkar (@techmilind) March 25, 2015
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but open source foundations are really useful. As a consumer, it helps you ensure that there is an independent governance structure in place along with fair ownership of the code (usually the foundation). This means that code won’t disappear overnight since an independent entity owns it, along with the broader community. From a producer point of view, you can build diversity in ownership and committers which will help you in the long run in building a sustainable open source community.
Oh well, c’est la vie.
Quick update and nice set of genuine tweets from the CouchDB folks who saw the benefits of having the code exist at an open source foundation:
Companies working on @CouchDB have been bought by other companies including IBM. None of them could shut CouchDB down. Thanks to @TheASF!
— Jan Lehnardt (@janl) March 25, 2015
fyi, @CouchDB's progenitor abandoned the project in 2012. we survived. why? because that's what @theASF is designed for
— Noah Slater (@nslater) March 25, 2015
what would happen if the project you contribute to lost its BDFL? if the answer isn't "we'd cope", you're one event away from catastrophe
— Noah Slater (@nslater) March 25, 2015
if the @FoundationDB stuff demonstrates anything, it should be this: ALWAYS check governance before adding a project to your tech stack
— Noah Slater (@nslater) March 25, 2015