Aren't they doing some kind of goofy open source/proprietary differentiation, just like FoundationDB was doing? It looks like "the full copy of HyperDex Warp" (whatever that means) is what people are expected to pay for.
Hyperdex is the result of their ongoing research at Cornell University. They have a commercial spinoff which sells Hyperdex Warp which adds full ACID transactions on hyperdex. So if you don't need full acid transactions, you can use the OSS version, if you want the extra services you have to pay.
It's the same with all software, really: to be able to do a large scale project you have to have funding from somewhere, as you need developers full time working on it to fix/write the stuff no-one wants to fix/write. Some OSS projects get this funding indirectly by sponsored developers who work at company X and write OSS code all day for the project (this is what Linux uses). Other projects are funded by VC money, licenses, support contracts or ads. It's not common a large scale OSS project is successful and stays successful without any funding from the outside.
Thus, if a piece of software gets its funding by selling licenses (like with Hyperdex Warp), it's the same as with a company getting funding by sponsoring: if the cashflow stops, the show ends. In the case of OSS you can grab the sourcecode at least, but in the end, to successfully maintain that it takes a lot of effort most of the time, as the projects are often large, complex and the internals unknown to the user.
Thanks for the pointer to cockroachdb. The last I'd checked (over a year ago), FoundationDB was the only reasonable option for distributed ACID transactions, so it's good to see something else with the same goals.
Yes, we have very similar goals with CockroachDB as FoundationDB had: a distributed, transactional data store (ACID, CP, etc). We're starting with the key/value layer, although we have ambitions to also build more structured interfaces on top of it. It's not quite ready for use yet but we're approaching our first alpha release.
+1 on this one. The best product managers I've ever met were former engineers who were good developers, but wanted something broader. That background (and a true love of technology) will make you a stellar product manager. But, be sure you really love the technology industry and are ready to give up day-to-day coding.
Product management, when done right, complements development and is a great career path for well-rounded individuals.
-1 On becoming a PM. There's thousands of people who faked their way into developer jobs. Then they saw it's a lot easier to not have to deliver anything and decided they were going to be people persons.
Not being a developer is prime evidence that a person is NOT a good developer. Everybody who tries to make this play claims they're a good developer that moved on but kept their skills. 90% of the time they didn't have the skill to begin with. There are people in PM roles claiming to be developers that, at least on paper, wrote code for literally six months.
How would anyone be a 10x PM? Do they 'leader' real hard or go to 10x the number of meetings? I was just reading something about what makes a good PM, and one of the items was similar to 'shows leadership in funding projects.' Virtually every measure of a PM is just business doublespeak about leadership or something that the PM does not actually do like 'shows technical leadership in shipping software.'
Same here - I'll never recommend them, and have actively discouraged people from using or investigating them.
They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.
That sound you hear is a giant checkbook opening in the direction of Pintrest. The parallels with Google Video and Youtube shouldn't be lost on anyone.
The long term goals of that project seem to align.