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radimm 9 hours ago [-]
This is the message the author posted on LinkedIn:
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.
Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
Like everyone else, I need to make a living, and the range of pgBackRest-related roles is very limited. I can now consider a wider variety of opportunities, but those will not leave me time to work on pgBackRest, which requires a fair amount of time for maintenance, bug fixes, PR reviews, answering issues, etc. That does not even include time to write new features, which is what I really love to do. Rather than do the work poorly and/or sporadically, I think it makes more sense to have a hard stop.
I will post a notice of obsolescence and archive the repository. I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
Again, many thanks to all the pgBackRest contributors over the years. It was a pleasure working with you!
Vordimous8 hours ago [-]
Thank you for adding this here.
drcongo 9 hours ago [-]
That text is right there in the link, we don't need to read it twice.
fsckboy 8 hours ago [-]
>"we don't need to read it" [here]
many people here don't read the articles, and that's not going to change. (on today's internet, jumping from the site you want to be on to a site with unknown UX patterns is fraught)
but people here do read the comments, so having important details from the articles in comments here improves the quality of comments here, at least if you value staying on topic.
3form 7 hours ago [-]
I think mostly the point is that it inadvertently implies that the message adds something new. A note that the same thing was posted on LinkedIn would help the ones tho did read the linked content know right away it's the same. I managed to just move on, but I did had a knee-jerk moment of "what if I'm missing something?" - I suppose for some people it's more difficult.
avazhi 3 hours ago [-]
Why would somebody click a link to GitHub and then not read the text that very obviously pertains to the title of the submission they clicked on?
Also saying that GitHub has unknown UX patterns made me lol.
gsich 7 hours ago [-]
>fraught
dumb "journalists" especially have this backwards mindset.
stronglikedan 8 hours ago [-]
Why did you read it twice if you didn't need to? Seems unnecessary. I only read it once and just ignored it on subsequent encounters.
drcongo 3 hours ago [-]
Trying to find what context was on LinkedIn but not in the posted link. Spoiler alert, there was none.
freakynit 11 hours ago [-]
So sad to see this happening..
I had just last year prepared a detailed guide for reliable postgre backups to local volume as well as cloud storage, using pgBackRest, for my own projects.. pgBackRest have worked so well for me
Thanks to the author for all the time and effort he put into this project..
faangguyindia 9 hours ago [-]
One thing people are not taking into account is that many developers now have less time and are working a lot more because AI makes it seem it should be possible to hit those deadlines, etc.
Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.
2ndorderthought 11 hours ago [-]
I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.
freakynit 10 hours ago [-]
True.. I truly wish wish we had better open-source license and more open-source projects adopt it..
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.
lelanthran 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
topham 10 hours ago [-]
Sigh. Bane of my existence is any service which does this.
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.
2ndorderthought 10 hours ago [-]
It would be great if github or someone did something to support licenses like this. So procurement was more like a cloud spend. Companies could put caps on the monthly spend for the projects they use. Organizations should be used to paying for products from individuals just like how they do from megacorporations.
Chris2048 33 minutes ago [-]
Would a third party 'productising' FOSS be acceptable to the FOSS community?
for example, adding support, bug fixes, corp-friendly licencing and pricing models, private code/package repos, code/package signing, etc. Providing biz ppl to be available for meetings, legal protection, PII, etc.
May be inconvenient to you, but the point of licenses like that is that inconvenience to companies that aren't willing to pay for the work.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for 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.
hoistbypetard 8 hours ago [-]
> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.
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.
vladvasiliu 7 hours ago [-]
And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year.
See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.
spockz 6 hours ago [-]
So. If we fix that loophole we both get proper tax revenue and we get to fund OSS better. I say win-win. Although it will be hard to implement in practice.
Chris2048 7 hours ago [-]
> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit
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?
jumpconc 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds like whoever is getting that money is hamstringing your organization on purpose so they can keep more of your money.
8organicbits 9 hours ago [-]
Is there a measurement that would work better for your organizations setup?
didgetmaster 10 hours ago [-]
The project is being abandoned because the maintainer is tired of working for free. They said that they hoped someone would fork it, change the name, and pick up where it was left off.
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.
cortesoft 6 hours ago [-]
An alternative reading is that after 13 years dedicated to a single project, the original author is simply burnt out on it, but a new maintainer can start with fresh passion that will last a number of years.
Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.
didgetmaster 5 hours ago [-]
Did you read the notice on the git hub site? I think he clearly states that he wanted to continue to work on the project, but could not justify it after sources of funding failed to materialize.
cortesoft 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, but a new maintainer might have different needs. The original maintainer doesn’t have the time now to do the work for free, since they have to also have a job to pay the bills. A new maintainer might have more free time, at least for a while…
tclancy 9 hours ago [-]
While I tend to agree with the line of thinking in this thread that the ethos of open source (and the web writ large) have been taken advantage of by capitalism, I can't quite see this: things belong to a time and place in one's life. The creator feels like his time with this project is at an end, but why would that be an impediment to someone who needs a package like this stepping up and maintaining it? Better to do that than build a replacement from scratch (most likely). And more likely to attract new sponsorship by being a reliable steward of a known name (albeit with a suffix or something).
gjsman-1000 9 hours ago [-]
> have been taken advantage of by capitalism
“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.
pdimitar 8 hours ago [-]
What is RMS quote supposed to prove here? We can always find new work? Is that it? If so -- not so fast. When you have a family, your freedom is severely hampered. Most companies understand this and abuse it.
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.
didgetmaster 5 hours ago [-]
It is my experience that most people work hard to 'get ahead' and not to merely survive. Yes, we will work for subsistence wages if no other option exists, but the goal is to thrive.
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.
jancsika 6 hours ago [-]
> and clueless about how power works, from day 1
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."
WickedSmoke 7 hours ago [-]
Communism occurs in part whenever a need is met or an economic decision is made without using value tokens. Direct access to resources without money happens every day (e.g. anyone using Linux rather than a proprietary OS, or exercising in a public park rather than a for-profit gym). The only thing keeping other products & services hoarded behind paywalls is devotion to capitalist ideology. It literally is a problem of capitalism. The structure of the world outside of people's brains has nothing to do with it.
tclancy 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 9 hours ago [-]
> what fool would think things will be different going forward?
> 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.
jumpconc 10 hours ago [-]
The struggles of living in an economic system while completely rejecting that system and pretending it isn't there.
AndyNemmity 9 hours ago [-]
There is no evidence of any of that.
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
j1elo 10 hours ago [-]
Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward.
If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)
I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.
hosh 7 hours ago [-]
Something I learned about being a part of an ecosystem: if you want it, you need to support it and help it stay alive.
That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.
briffle 6 hours ago [-]
The project has never even had a donation button on its page, only a link with a few sponsors.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder whether the author has considered taking the product to a paid level and what would be necessary for it.
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.
j1elo 7 hours ago [-]
Changing the license of already existing code? You might not be able to do that without permission from other contributors, I agree.
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.
pasc1878 8 hours ago [-]
ANd that gets rather looked on here as the authors being deceitful and not really Open Source doing a bait and switch.
tracker1 6 hours ago [-]
I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers.
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.
bartread 6 hours ago [-]
You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.
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.
j1elo 4 hours ago [-]
Platform providers can take (A)GPL code as-is and totally profit from it without paying.
As long as they keep releasing sources of their own modifications -if they ever do any-, the rest is fair play.
bartread 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but the copyleft makes anything they build around it a derivative work that they also have to release sources for - especially with AGPL. Most don’t want to do that because that’s where their IP lives.
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.
j1elo 4 hours ago [-]
I wholeheartedly agree. Licensing is a complex topic of which I've read a good deal, and even within the Open Source communities there are usually a lot of misconceptions, so I like chiming in with less commonly pointed but very practical effects of it all, in case it helps someone to learn a tiny bit that day.
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.
tracker1 4 hours ago [-]
It would be dual license effectively... the base version AGPL and the Commercial version with additional functionality. Though I'd considered BSL and alternatives... and as mentioned, just closed/commercial only.
bdcravens 9 hours ago [-]
"so sad to see this"
The source is still available. Maintaining your own copy and/or paying someone to do it is an option.
While you're at it, look at all the projects you depend on that you would similarly be sad about losing, and set up those donations today.
thinkingtoilet 8 hours ago [-]
This is the right attitude. All the "this is sad" comments make me want to ask, "How sad are you? Sad enough to donate?"
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
For me the sad part about the story is that someone who clearly knows what they are doing wasn’t able to find a job that would have permitted him to continue working on the project and that there were insufficient sponsors from companies.
Not the fact that he made the decision he made.
manquer 5 hours ago [-]
Database backup tools are used primarily in enterprise context. (In)Ability to donate is not a function of personal spending preferences
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.
saadn92 7 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.
elAhmo 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rowanG077 6 hours ago [-]
Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?
cornstalks 5 hours ago [-]
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).
alexpadula 36 minutes ago [-]
They don't make much off this, its known.
registeredcorn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cornstalks 1 hours ago [-]
SQLite is arguably the most widely deployed database in the world. It also has its roots in government/defense contracting so it was built with navigating that kind of red tape in mind.
Most OSS projects simply don’t have that kind of weight or discipline to follow SQLite’s footsteps.
qq66 1 hours ago [-]
There are business models that work for the extraordinarily popular open source projects (Linux, SQLite, etc.) that don't work for the "well-used piece of infrastructure" projects, even though that category is very important in aggregate
vkou 40 minutes ago [-]
Because at that point it's not a 'project', it is a full business.
rowanG077 5 hours ago [-]
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.
cornstalks 4 hours ago [-]
PGBackRest was sponsored by some specific organizations, but not owned by them, and PGBackRest was not their product.
SQLite is in a whole different league when it comes to funding, corporate support, etc. There are commercial contracts directly tied to its ongoing support and development. As far as I understand SQLite is Hwaci’s bread and butter.
doctoboggan 5 hours ago [-]
Its an LLM comment, don't search too deeply for logical consistency
Matl 6 hours ago [-]
Because it's a single file you can back up like any other?
rowanG077 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Matl 4 hours ago [-]
Well, yes, I meant that you don't need any 'special' tooling for Sqlite, whereas you do for pg.
dijit 11 hours ago [-]
Wow!
pgbackrest was definitely the premier backup solution for postgres when I last looked at the ecosystem properly.
I dunno how they compare, but we have been using barman for a long time very happily. We test our backups every night, by restoring from barman into a _nightly DB. which we then give out to users as a training/testing spot, so that we know when it breaks. It hasn't broken in many years now. <3
__s 5 hours ago [-]
I'm one of many wal-g maintainers, it's comparable. I've been inactive for past few years, but back in managed postgres game. Hoping to get support for pg17 incremental backups alongside wal-g's existing delta backups where wal-g compares blocks itself. Be sure to use daemon mode
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
andruby 10 hours ago [-]
We've been happy with WAL-E and now WAL-G (successor). The streaming PITR nature of these won over pgbackrest when we did the analysis ~9 years ago.
fabian2k 10 hours ago [-]
Are you using WAL archiving? As far as I understand, pgbackrest and Barman can also use direct streaming from the DB (same mechanism as replication), I didn't find any mention of this in the WAL-G documentation.
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.
andruby 8 hours ago [-]
WAL-G's PITR backups are insurance against data loss through erroneous data manipulations (eg: accidental DELETE/DROP/UPDATE). WAL-G's streaming approach (using pg_receivewal or similar) sends WAL records to backup storage continuously as they're generated, rather than waiting for a full segment to complete.
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
dwwoelfel 5 hours ago [-]
Are you using `walg wal-receive` for streaming? As far as I can tell, that command will wait for the full wal segment before it pushes anything to storage. I don't see any way to stream wal records continuously in wal-g.
noosphr 11 hours ago [-]
>Wow, this is pretty surprising, I was under the impression that this is the leading PG backup/recovery tool.
I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
sgarland 10 hours ago [-]
I've used barman on somewhat large-ish DBs (30+ TB), and had no complaints with it. I am a DBRE, if that holds any weight.
briffle 5 hours ago [-]
We recently moved from Barman to pgBackrest. Our main complaints with barman were that incremental backups utilized hardlinks. Which was great, we could have our 7TB database backed up, and the next day, only 20GB in changes. But, when replicating that data to cloud storage, there is no concept of hardlinks, so now we had to push 14TB to cloud storage. Also, at least last time we looked a while back, file compression was only the WAL files, unless you used the newer barman-cloud-backup tool, which we did not.
Also, pgBackrest lets you do the majority of the backup from a physical standby, which is VERY nice for removing the load off production.
None of these seemed like issues, until we looked at pgBarman, and suddenly realized how nice that would be.
joshmn 9 hours ago [-]
barman seems to cover "Natural disaster" in their docs. Seems good.
Backing up multi terabyte production postgres databases is not merely cos playing ha ha
infinet 4 hours ago [-]
Anyone put the standby on ZFS or other filesystems that can take snapshots for backup?
drcongo 10 hours ago [-]
I can beat you on the timing - I'd never used pgBackRest before, but started setting it up on a project about 2 hours ago, by the time I'd finished the README had been updated.
hosteur 10 hours ago [-]
databasus does not do PITR.
zigzag312 9 hours ago [-]
Is that info up-to-date? Their readme states:
**Backup types**
- **Logical** — Native dump of the database in its engine-specific binary format. Compressed and streamed directly to storage with no intermediate files
- **Physical** — File-level copy of the entire database cluster. Faster backup and restore for large datasets compared to logical dumps
- **Incremental** — Physical base backup combined with continuous WAL segment archiving. **Enables Point-in-time recovery (PITR)** — restore to any second between backups. Designed for disaster recovery and near-zero data loss requirements
EDIT: It seem PITR has been added this March (for PostgreSQL)
pgbackrest is the most versatile piece of backup technology for PostgreSQL and in my experience the other products do not come close.
I am therefore quite sad to see this happen. It won't be easy to get feature parity with this great product.
I sincerely hope this is a reversible decision, or perhaps the postgres project could even absorb it into contrib.
dotBen 8 hours ago [-]
It's funny how developer time is considered free, but tokens are not.
In other words when it comes to FOSS contribution, developer time can be donated but tokens can't - so as we move into agentic code era all FOSS development carries a cost unless it is purely done by hand (which more often it isn't).
Not saying this is what is going on here but it's presumably a factor if the author was looking for an employer to sponsor development with his labor (and tokens).
Aeolun 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand this? I donate plenty of tokens towards OSS.
I guess it’s anthropic donating the tokens because they give me about $5k of API tokens for the $200 I pay them.
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
You could also donate money to allow the devs to spend it on tokens, right?
aetherspawn 9 hours ago [-]
It still works, you can just keep using it.
I think that’s what the author would want. People to keep using it until it doesn’t work anymore.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
And hopefully someone wants to stand up then. Not sure whether it needs to be a fork or that they can join as contributor on the repo.
fabian2k 11 hours ago [-]
I was about to set up Postgres backups with pgbackrest very soon. It looked like the most mature solution for my use case. What I was aiming for was continuous backups to an object storage provider, without a central DB server but the backup tool directly installed on the Postgres server.
I'll have to look at the alternatives again, I think that was mostly WAL-G and Barman. It looks like Barman doesn't support direct backup to object storage, unfortunately. And I find the WAL-G documentation very confusing. What I'm looking for is WAL streaming and object storage support, to minimize the amount of data that can be lost and so I don't have to run my own backup server.
drcongo 10 hours ago [-]
This is exactly what I was setting it up to do this morning. My research came down to this and WAL-G for the same reasons, and I picked pgBackRest over WAL-G because the documentation was clearer.
pjmlp 10 hours ago [-]
Plenty of comments of "So sad I have been using this".
How many actually contributed back to keep it going?
FartyMcFarter 10 hours ago [-]
The number of maintainers is always smaller than the number of users for any successful project. GitHub displays the number of contributors as 57, I don't know if that's small or not.
9 hours ago [-]
kreco 7 hours ago [-]
This is such hackernews comment.
Not everything is about money.
I can use Pgbackrest in my side project which does not generate any money. Maybe my side project is another open source project where no one give me money, but I'm still contributing to the open source ecosystem, maybe I reported bugs which help everyone.
There are so may details and possible reasons to not give money and use open source software, but your negative and naive comment totally miss them.
Quothling 7 hours ago [-]
How often are the consumers and users of tools like this also in positions to contribute financially? It's silly, but I can spin up $10000 worth of azure resources and nobody would mind (as long as they actally had a purpose etc). In contrast I doubt I'd ever get a decisionmaker to sign off on supporting an OSS project with even $50, even if we have tech that depends on it.
LetMeLogin 10 hours ago [-]
I am not sure why are you gatekeeping this? People can't comment now that they are sad because of what happened?
jmull 8 hours ago [-]
I’d think the lesson here is obvious, but maybe not.
If you thought this project had value, you could’ve contributed to it. You probably still could.
Or, if you think its value is worth $0 (to you), maybe it’s not really that sad (to you).
People are expressing sadness as if there was nothing to be done about it, but, of course, there’s a really straight-forward thing that could’ve been done about it (possibly still could).
pjmlp 10 hours ago [-]
Gatekeeping?!?
Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
Others should consider this is what happens to that lego piece in Nebraska, when no one contributes, and everyone uses it.
piva00 10 hours ago [-]
That is exactly gatekeeping, no? You are only entitled to feel sad if you contributed effort or financially, otherwise you aren't allowed to feel.
Why can't others that just used the tool feel sad? It is supposed to be used, it's the whole reason for it to exist; not everyone using it will have technical expertise or money to contribute to it, feeling sad about it when it solved issues for someone is a completely normal response.
AndyNemmity 10 hours ago [-]
The reason for something to exist is not to be used. He was paid while doing it, and that pay stopped, and he kept doing it. Now he wishes to stop.
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.
piva00 9 hours ago [-]
The reason for a tool to exist is to be used, even if it's just by a singular person, other projects that aren't tools do definitely fit into the criteria "just for the joy of it" but a tool, by definition, has at least one usage, and building a tool gives someone joy from the tool being useful.
The sadness doesn't need to be focused anywhere, you can feel sad for more than one thing at a time. People can be sad that a tool they think is great, have relied on, and has been important for their use case is going away while also be sad that such a great tool doesn't get enough support from companies. Both can be true, no need to control what people can or should feel.
electroly 9 hours ago [-]
They're right. This is over the top. Your initial post in this thread was sensible (telling the users of Pgbackrest that they should have supported it if they didn't want this to happen, and saying nothing about what emotions are valid to have), but you took it much further here. People should financially support the OSS projects they use, and the lack of such support is why this project is no longer maintained, but claiming people aren't allowed to feel anything about it is just playing a game that isn't helping the cause. We all know this problem, and being sad while having not supported the project isn't a statement that we disagree that the problem exists. It's a big stretch to assume that it is.
I've never heard of this project before and I still think it's a bummer that a tool people liked and that the maintainer cared about was unable to find backing. I was never going to support it; I just heard of it for the first time today and I don't use it! I'm still sad. We're not robots here. We're fellow developers, and we know it's tough out there.
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
> Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.
I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.
hakube 7 hours ago [-]
People can't be sad now?
ordu 10 hours ago [-]
If I didn't use Pgbackrest and never contributed to it, am I entitled to feel sadness?
victorbjorklund 10 hours ago [-]
It's such a strawman to claim that you cannot be sad if something disappears where you have not financially or you work contributed. Someone can say that they are sad that the Notre Dame burned down even if they haven't personally contributed to Notre Dame.
jhardcastle 10 hours ago [-]
That comparison is fallacious too, I think.
Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.
Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."
Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."
victorbjorklund 10 hours ago [-]
Alright, take a park closing then. Can you be sad about that if you haven't personally raised money to finance the park?
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
I pay taxes. I pay for every park in my city. I pay for state and national parks too. I rarely/never use them. I have no choice. That makes me sad. I wish I could direct where my personal tax dollars were spent, but that kind of defeats the point of taxes, which are to fund the things that nobody wants to pay for (or are impractical to pay for, individually).
victorbjorklund 4 hours ago [-]
There are parks that are not owned by the govt.
jamespo 7 hours ago [-]
Ah the "I would pay for firefox but" fallacy
esafak 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, I can't finance every park. I can feel sad about people suffering throughout the world without personally supporting them all.
I am an active open source contributor.
victorbjorklund 4 hours ago [-]
I can’t finance every single open source project in the world either (I am also an open source contributor but with very small libs).
AndyNemmity 10 hours ago [-]
Well said, accurate framing.
imrozim 7 hours ago [-]
This is scary as a solo dev who builts on postgresql. You pick a tool trust it, build around it, one day it stops. Oss sustainability is a real problem
3form 7 hours ago [-]
I would say "unpaid tool use" is a real problem. Or perhaps "contractless" is actually touching the core issue?
imrozim 6 hours ago [-]
True but as a solo dev, you cant afford to pay for every tool you depend on. That's the trap.
I'm also using this project. Easy to configure and operate.
I am feeling a slight unease using such a recent project for things as important as the database. But the polished interface combined with the easy docker deployment made me use it anyway. Restores need some permission tuning on PostgreSQL but otherwise happy.
They are very proud of their github star acquisition curve [0], the "blessing" by Anthropic [1]
This project looks nice, albeit a bit young for a backup tool.
Did you encounter any issues or limitations?
cpursley 9 hours ago [-]
Same, was really easy to set up.
ellieh 5 hours ago [-]
I wish it was easier to know which projects are in desperate need of funding because I love pgbackrest and totally would have donated here, and I suspect many others would have too :/
Really sad to see this. I had only recently learnt about this project, and was really impressed by it. I was planning to set it up this weekend (via autobase). I've also been under the impression that it's likely to be what powers the backups in RDS, Cloud SQL, etc., but I may have misunderstood.
steveharing1 9 hours ago [-]
I won't say He should be working on it no matter what but I believe its a very good project and I think as always community forks will be the only option when it won't work in future
evertheylen 11 hours ago [-]
Ah, sad to read this. Does anyone know of good alternatives?
DeathArrow 10 hours ago [-]
Postgres has built-in backups starting with version 18.
evertheylen 10 hours ago [-]
From what I can find Postgres 17 [1] introduced incremental backups to pg_basebackup, refined in 18, but nowhere near the full featureset of pgBackRest. Is that what you meant? Having builtin incremental replication to a S3-compatible storage would be great.
Yes! But I'm assuming it will prevent me from upgrading to Postgres 19 in the future.
whateveracct 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with the internals, but is backing up that coupled to Postgres version? That feels so brittle to me.
afgrant 8 hours ago [-]
Does Postgres no have online backup built in? All of the other major DBMSes do.
nijave 7 hours ago [-]
Postgres is very "unix-y" in that everything is a separate tool. It has backup interfaces and commands but doesn't ship with a comprehensive backup management solution.
all of these various 3rd party backup tools use these things. Mostly it's QOL stuff that you get from a 3rd party tool. We use barman, very happily: https://pgbarman.org/
nijave 7 hours ago [-]
Hopefully barman has some longevity being under EDB assuming some hyperscaler doesn't gobble them up
zie 6 hours ago [-]
Barman has been around since 2011, released under the GPL. If it does get ruined by someone, I'll replace it in my stack or fork it for maintenance myself. I'm not very worried though.
EDB has been in private equity(PE) hands since 2019 with out managing to ruin it so far. The ownership in PE hands seems to be pretty stable, so it doesn't look like the typical pump/dump mess you often see from crappy PE money.
dzonga 10 hours ago [-]
props to the author for such fine work.
hopefully some of the big co's step up & pay a retainer to keep the author going.
colesantiago 11 hours ago [-]
> Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
So this was the problem, I thought Snowflake would pick up the sponsorship of this project but since it is a competing database it doesn't really make much sense.
I really wish many critical OSS projects get the sponsorship they need to continue.
Otherwise the software industry is in real trouble.
Forking it just passes the buck onto another maintainer with the same problem, this time without the original creator maintaining it.
wg0 11 hours ago [-]
Very simple. Name it to pgbackrest-AI and add the line:
"AI driven backups with smartest world class models optimizing every byte stored via deep AI analysis."
With that added, a million dollars is just chimp change. YC alone would be adding them to all the seasons multiple times over summer, winter and monsoon etc.
nijave 7 hours ago [-]
Postgres doesn't compete with Snowflake. Snowflake recently announced a Postgres DBaaS offering that integrates with Snowflake (actually has competitive pricing with AWS RDS Postgres)
They're two non competing verticals. It's a shame Snowflake decided to shrink Crunchy Data's community presence.
I doubt that they have sponsored an OSS project or made it sustainable.
mmaunder 7 hours ago [-]
Metrics would help others who may want to rescue the project consider the options. Eg user base would make it clear if there’s an immediate opportunity to work with the author to launch a paid backup service around the project, funding continued work on it.
maherbeg 8 hours ago [-]
pgbackrest is awesome, truly. Thank you so much for the work you've put into this project over the years, and I'm sad the crunchy data acquisition couldn't keep the project alive.
iconicBark 10 hours ago [-]
I use pgbackrest for some databases in production, and it has been VERY good.
SupLockDef 7 hours ago [-]
Another one bites the dust...
Is it me ore I am seeing more and more projects being unmaintained due to financial and/or mental fatigue?
Sorry to hear this. Well done for maintaining a successful project for so long.
bobkb 11 hours ago [-]
So sad. We have been using this amazing project extensively
borplk 7 hours ago [-]
I find it shocking (not really) that among the many BILLION dollar companies built on the back of Postgres there isn't enough sense to pay the salary of one dude to keep a project like this going forever.
alexpadula 6 hours ago [-]
wild isn't it
dcchambers 8 hours ago [-]
We're going to see a lot of this over the next 1-2 years.
Software Engineers suddenly feel like they're fighting for their lives for employment, and time won't be "wasted" maintaining OSS for free.
We all need to eat.
oulipo2 11 hours ago [-]
Waiting for all the C-level execs saying that "anyway this is not needed, we're going to vibe-code a solution to our production database backups" lol
absynth 11 hours ago [-]
The backups will then be hyper-optimized from three hours down to 5 minutes using devnull compression technologies. Its super effective!
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
Why even waste all this time and money on backups in the first place? Just don't make mistakes.
theandrewbailey 11 hours ago [-]
Only for their AI to delete the production database and all the backups, and be forced to write an apology.
The A.I will probably steal the code and make it an unmaintainable mess that deletes backups when someone tries to restore
nailer 11 hours ago [-]
Mentioned this on X but CockroachDB should sponsor this - their audience is Postgres people and open source contributions can be great marketing.
immanuwell 7 hours ago [-]
thirteen years of blood, sweat, and late nights shipped into the void - respect to David Steele for keeping it real and pulling the plug clean rather than letting it rot in maintenance burden
thrownaway561 10 hours ago [-]
i wish the guy could have made a paid version so he could have continued it. Unfortunately, most people do not want to financially contribute to open source and especially when that open source project becomes a paid product.
alex_suzuki 7 hours ago [-]
adding to that, lots of devs don’t want the hassle of running a software business
WaitWaitWha 8 hours ago [-]
do not yell at me, but... this is where genAI may be useful.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
Yes, lots of details to work out.
DeathArrow 11 hours ago [-]
I have recently configured pgbackrest for our app. :(
hleszek 11 hours ago [-]
Why not try to find a successor instead of archiving the repo and forbidding the use of the name? I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.
bayindirh 11 hours ago [-]
Sometimes you want to hang things to your wall, and be done with it.
I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.
Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.
Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.
It is reasonable to ask for a follow-up project/fork to take a different name. Naming your project, e. G., pgbackrest-ng, does not sound too onerous of a requirement and clearly communicates to users that maintainers have changed (see also paperless ng/ngx as good examples of such a change).
Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).
xnorswap 11 hours ago [-]
You'll also find plenty of potential malware injectors too, and who would want the responsibility of trying to vet a successor and have to work out the difference?
dschuessler 11 hours ago [-]
Because you will attract people who will want to take advantage of the trust these 3.8k stars signal to some people, for example, by means of supply chain attacks.
leoc 8 hours ago [-]
The Apache Foundation used to help with this sort of governance problem didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.
jeswin 11 hours ago [-]
There's no way to know if a new maintainer will live up to whatever standards they've kept to date. Archiving should be the default decision, unless there's formal and elaborate handover.
arbll 11 hours ago [-]
A maintainer that is mainly motivated by the 3.8k stars aspect is probably not the person you want. Working on critical OSS software is fun until it's not, especially when you are not paid for that work.
hombre_fatal 11 hours ago [-]
Because that rug pulls your users.
3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.
vova_hn2 6 hours ago [-]
> I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you will find lots of competent people. Like Jia Tan, for example. I've heard he is very competent.
AndyNemmity 9 hours ago [-]
Why is it the responsibility of the person working for free?
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
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
Those people can just as easily fork it and make a new name then. Otherwise you end up with situations where it's actually an entirely new thing under new developers under the same name. Even riskier in the age of the "AI clean rewrite"
moritzruth 10 hours ago [-]
They are not really forbidding the use of the name (unless they have registered a trademark), they probably simply want to avoid confusion.
freedomben 10 hours ago [-]
> TL;DR: pgBackRest is no longer being maintained. If you fork pgBackRest, please select a new name for your project.
> I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There may be someone very qualified willing to step up, and that could give your existing users continuity.
This feels analgous to deciding to stop maintaining a community garden, but rather than let your neighbor step up, you decide to salt the ground so it can never grow there again, telling your neighbors "you can pull up my plants and move them, but you can't use all the ground and roots that are already there." It just feels bitter.
Latty 10 hours ago [-]
To me it reads as being worried that someone malicious could step in and use the project's name to do harm. If you don't have someone within the project with trust built ready-to-go, establishing that trust enough to hand over the project is a big task.
freedomben 8 hours ago [-]
I totally agree, that is a huge risk. But what if someone from the postgres team decided to step up and maintain it? I'm not saying that's likely, but it is possible for a very popular tool like this. With the way the project exited now, that would not at all be an option. Obviously if postgres themselves decided to do it, they wouldn't need the previous credibility so this isn't the best example
leoc 8 hours ago [-]
The Apache Foundation used to step in in this kind of situation, didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.
_flux 8 hours ago [-]
If someone really wants to continue the name, they can of course ask the author; maybe they have a compelling case.
rolfvandekrol 10 hours ago [-]
From the story told in the README it is clear this is a project ran by a single person. There is no wider maintenance team that can be trusted with continuing the project. So anyone who offers to take up the maintenance will be unknown to the current maintainer and cannot automatically be trusted.
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.
freedomben 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, but what if someone from the postgres team decided they wanted to step up? The door is completely shut for that now. And if we can't trust someone from the postgres team to do it, then who can we trust?
vova_hn2 6 hours ago [-]
> The door is completely shut for that now.
No, it's not. You can still contact the author and ask them to transfer the name to you.
AndyNemmity 10 hours ago [-]
It can still be forked. There is no salting the ground here. If you maintain the project and have for a long time, and you wish to stop, you can stop.
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.
remus 10 hours ago [-]
I think this is overly harsh. After the guy has been working on the project for such a long period a handover would inevitably be a long process, not least to ensure whoever took over didn't abuse the existing user-base. Completely fair if the existing maintainer doesn't want to take on this work, and arguably a fork forces consumers to properly consider that someone else is in charge now.
Is it really that much effort to maintain something? I’ll admit I haven’t the foggiest, my most maintained thing having like 200 stars or something, but if I leave it alone for half a year it doesn’t suddenly combust into flame.
matkoniecz 4 hours ago [-]
> Is it really that much effort to maintain something?
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.
Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
Like everyone else, I need to make a living, and the range of pgBackRest-related roles is very limited. I can now consider a wider variety of opportunities, but those will not leave me time to work on pgBackRest, which requires a fair amount of time for maintenance, bug fixes, PR reviews, answering issues, etc. That does not even include time to write new features, which is what I really love to do. Rather than do the work poorly and/or sporadically, I think it makes more sense to have a hard stop.
I will post a notice of obsolescence and archive the repository. I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
Again, many thanks to all the pgBackRest contributors over the years. It was a pleasure working with you!
many people here don't read the articles, and that's not going to change. (on today's internet, jumping from the site you want to be on to a site with unknown UX patterns is fraught)
but people here do read the comments, so having important details from the articles in comments here improves the quality of comments here, at least if you value staying on topic.
Also saying that GitHub has unknown UX patterns made me lol.
dumb "journalists" especially have this backwards mindset.
I had just last year prepared a detailed guide for reliable postgre backups to local volume as well as cloud storage, using pgBackRest, for my own projects.. pgBackRest have worked so well for me
https://github.com/freakynit/postgre-backup-and-restore-guid...
Thanks to the author for all the time and effort he put into this project..
Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.
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.
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.
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.
for example, adding support, bug fixes, corp-friendly licencing and pricing models, private code/package repos, code/package signing, etc. Providing biz ppl to be available for meetings, legal protection, PII, etc.
To foster goodwill, they could even send some of the profit back to the original maintainer, ala pikapods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31312682
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.
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.
See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.
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?
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.
Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.
“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.
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."
> 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.
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
If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product-level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit company to step in and cover that niche. But that'd require that users became customers and actually departed from their money to pay for it :)
I guess most will switch instead to asking who's the next project maintainer to work on it, to whom the new bug reports and complaints can continue to be sent for free. But if there's money to be made by using a tool, there should be money paid for using it too. We "just" need to find the new generation of FOSS Financial Sustainability solutions that actually work! Donations don't make the cut.
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.
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.
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.
As long as they keep releasing sources of their own modifications -if they ever do any-, the rest is fair play.
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.
The source is still available. Maintaining your own copy and/or paying someone to do it is an option.
While you're at it, look at all the projects you depend on that you would similarly be sad about losing, and set up those donations today.
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.
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.
General idea still stands, but it is not like this just disappeared and backups will stop working.
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).
Most OSS projects simply don’t have that kind of weight or discipline to follow SQLite’s footsteps.
SQLite is in a whole different league when it comes to funding, corporate support, etc. There are commercial contracts directly tied to its ongoing support and development. As far as I understand SQLite is Hwaci’s bread and butter.
It was the only solution that seemed to take restoring and validating as seriously as “taking a backup” which lead to an unfortunate situation with my employer. (details here: https://blog.dijit.sh/that-time-my-manager-spend-1m-on-a-bac...)
This is really a major loss. :(
Anybody know how WAL-G and Barman compare?
https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g
https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/barman
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
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.
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
https://xkcd.com/2347/
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
Also, pgBackrest lets you do the majority of the backup from a physical standby, which is VERY nice for removing the load off production.
None of these seemed like issues, until we looked at pgBarman, and suddenly realized how nice that would be.
I'll take a look. Thanks!
https://github.com/aiven-open/pghoard seems like a good option too, but I haven’t tested it yet to have a solid opinion.
https://github.com/databasus/databasus/issues/411
I am therefore quite sad to see this happen. It won't be easy to get feature parity with this great product.
I sincerely hope this is a reversible decision, or perhaps the postgres project could even absorb it into contrib.
In other words when it comes to FOSS contribution, developer time can be donated but tokens can't - so as we move into agentic code era all FOSS development carries a cost unless it is purely done by hand (which more often it isn't).
Not saying this is what is going on here but it's presumably a factor if the author was looking for an employer to sponsor development with his labor (and tokens).
I guess it’s anthropic donating the tokens because they give me about $5k of API tokens for the $200 I pay them.
I think that’s what the author would want. People to keep using it until it doesn’t work anymore.
I'll have to look at the alternatives again, I think that was mostly WAL-G and Barman. It looks like Barman doesn't support direct backup to object storage, unfortunately. And I find the WAL-G documentation very confusing. What I'm looking for is WAL streaming and object storage support, to minimize the amount of data that can be lost and so I don't have to run my own backup server.
How many actually contributed back to keep it going?
Not everything is about money.
I can use Pgbackrest in my side project which does not generate any money. Maybe my side project is another open source project where no one give me money, but I'm still contributing to the open source ecosystem, maybe I reported bugs which help everyone.
There are so may details and possible reasons to not give money and use open source software, but your negative and naive comment totally miss them.
If you thought this project had value, you could’ve contributed to it. You probably still could.
Or, if you think its value is worth $0 (to you), maybe it’s not really that sad (to you).
People are expressing sadness as if there was nothing to be done about it, but, of course, there’s a really straight-forward thing that could’ve been done about it (possibly still could).
Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
Others should consider this is what happens to that lego piece in Nebraska, when no one contributes, and everyone uses it.
Why can't others that just used the tool feel sad? It is supposed to be used, it's the whole reason for it to exist; not everyone using it will have technical expertise or money to contribute to it, feeling sad about it when it solved issues for someone is a completely normal response.
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.
The sadness doesn't need to be focused anywhere, you can feel sad for more than one thing at a time. People can be sad that a tool they think is great, have relied on, and has been important for their use case is going away while also be sad that such a great tool doesn't get enough support from companies. Both can be true, no need to control what people can or should feel.
I've never heard of this project before and I still think it's a bummer that a tool people liked and that the maintainer cared about was unable to find backing. I was never going to support it; I just heard of it for the first time today and I don't use it! I'm still sad. We're not robots here. We're fellow developers, and we know it's tough out there.
I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.
I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.
Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.
Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."
Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."
I am an active open source contributor.
I am feeling a slight unease using such a recent project for things as important as the database. But the polished interface combined with the easy docker deployment made me use it anyway. Restores need some permission tuning on PostgreSQL but otherwise happy.
They are very proud of their github star acquisition curve [0], the "blessing" by Anthropic [1]
But I have yet to verify the Anthropic claim.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1q94uu9/selfhos... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rklvr7/anthropic...
Did you encounter any issues or limitations?
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/release/17.0/#:~:text=pg%5Fb...
all of these various 3rd party backup tools use these things. Mostly it's QOL stuff that you get from a 3rd party tool. We use barman, very happily: https://pgbarman.org/
EDB has been in private equity(PE) hands since 2019 with out managing to ruin it so far. The ownership in PE hands seems to be pretty stable, so it doesn't look like the typical pump/dump mess you often see from crappy PE money.
hopefully some of the big co's step up & pay a retainer to keep the author going.
So this was the problem, I thought Snowflake would pick up the sponsorship of this project but since it is a competing database it doesn't really make much sense.
I really wish many critical OSS projects get the sponsorship they need to continue.
Otherwise the software industry is in real trouble.
Forking it just passes the buck onto another maintainer with the same problem, this time without the original creator maintaining it.
"AI driven backups with smartest world class models optimizing every byte stored via deep AI analysis."
With that added, a million dollars is just chimp change. YC alone would be adding them to all the seasons multiple times over summer, winter and monsoon etc.
They're two non competing verticals. It's a shame Snowflake decided to shrink Crunchy Data's community presence.
I doubt that they have sponsored an OSS project or made it sustainable.
Is it me ore I am seeing more and more projects being unmaintained due to financial and/or mental fatigue?
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/author/chergert/
[2] https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/discussio...
[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/stepping-down-as-libxml2-maint...
Software Engineers suddenly feel like they're fighting for their lives for employment, and time won't be "wasted" maintaining OSS for free.
We all need to eat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911524
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
Yes, lots of details to work out.
I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.
Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.
Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).
3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you will find lots of competent people. Like Jia Tan, for example. I've heard he is very competent.
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
> I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did.
I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There may be someone very qualified willing to step up, and that could give your existing users continuity.
This feels analgous to deciding to stop maintaining a community garden, but rather than let your neighbor step up, you decide to salt the ground so it can never grow there again, telling your neighbors "you can pull up my plants and move them, but you can't use all the ground and roots that are already there." It just feels bitter.
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.
No, it's not. You can still contact the author and ask them to transfer the name to you.
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.
yes
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921198 for start
Bailey: maintaining a popular project is not that much work.
What?