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I feel like "OSS" is a bit of a misnomer in this case. Your DB cluster, to the degree that it's "production-grade", is partially managed by things like automated upgrade migrations, automatic backups, etc. Essentially, some (centralized!) team associated with the "OSS project" is acting as a devops team for the associated deployments of their project. It's almost as if this team had SSH access to each on-site cluster to ensure their continued smooth operation—but since they don't, they have to do all such maintenance in the form of pre-specifying repair/maintenence strategies, and then building expert-knowledge of when to apply those strategies into the DBMS software itself. But it's still a devops team sitting around doing this—not random contributors. It's a similar thing with e.g. Ubuntu LTS releases. The core distro might be FOSS, but those branches are uniquely the result of a centralized, corporate devops maintainership ensuring that the silent, automatic security and kernel package upgrades go off without a hitch. To be clear, I’m not saying you can’t join that maintainership; what I’m saying is that, unlike with a regular FOSS library or framework, or even a regular piece of FOSS daemon software like Apache, in the case of a DBMS, the software will only continue to run smoothly for as long as that maintainership is around to keep it running smoothly. There’s no such thing as a useful unmaintained DBMS, FOSS or not. And, because of that, the “calculus of TCO” for DBMS projects changes a bit. Unlike regular software, where “proprietary” translates to “higher potential TCO” because of switching costs, in the DBMS case, the “proprietary” vs “open” distinction is nothing next to the “big, healthy maintainership” vs “small, ailing maintainership” distinction. Because, if the DBMS loses all its maintainers? Now you’re stuck maintaining it—at the core level—yourself (and learning how to do so in the process) until such time as you can migrate your data away from it. Personally, for a production-grade DBMS, I’d trust a corporate-backed (or at least sponsored) product over one which is purely a volunteer effort any day. |