I wouldn't paint Canonical with that generalization. It's not unheard of that they have dropped projects, but I wouldn't say it's common. But looks like their primary use is LXD, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere...
But the main point made by the parent is entirely correct: the biggest issue isn’t that of implementing a consensus protocol: the biggest issue is the reconfiguration of the cluster, management of the dead/live nodes, addition of extra nodes for replacement, copying of the data before reconfiguration.
Indeed. I was reading the dqlite page thinking "where is the monitoring endpoint to tell if the cluster is healthy or degraded?" Too often that seems like an afterthought if it's thought of at all.
I have a teeny, tiny cluster using MySQL+galera as a multi-master cluster, but it took a while to iterate to monitoring that tells me when one node is unhealthy and getting the correct repair and restart procedures.
Yep! And you need someone to help fix bizarre bugs in core that only crop up in your own weird environment. With support that's quick & easy, but otherwise you have to form your own dev team to specialize in it, making it costlier.
It doesn't really matter who wrote it, it's a trope of corporate software development. A small team makes project X to support project Y. They go through the usual dev + production + maintenance cycle, which takes 2-3 years typically, sometimes 5, after which the team is disbanded/reorganized, and no new dev work happens on the old projects. The project is effectively abandoned at that point, unless it happens to have picked up enough users that "a community" forms and picks up development... but that's rare, because corporations don't want to give development of their project over to randos on the internet, especially if they're still using it. The best case is it would fork, or move to some other org's code repo.
I like to use projects which lots of other projects depend on directly. That way if the main project goes unsupported, all the other projects using it will band together to support a fork. I believe open source that is not created for a company will last much longer. (I like that they rewrote it in C, though; it would probably survive well as a fork if enough people/projects use it)
