OP's ask was: "Is this another one ... where open source is used more as a marketing gimmick"
My original comment wasn't intended to indicate that there is an obligation to provide support. The deliberate choice to: a) not offer paid support for open-source deployments, and b) sunsetting the Kubernetes deployments in favor of their cloud version, is a signal that shows PostHog doesn't /really/ want you to be running the software in a self-hosted manner.
Just look at the "Open-source hobby deploy" (from the README in git) which calls out that it "should scale to approximately 100k events per month" but their cloud offering gives you 1 million events per month for free. What is the point of the hobby "deploy"?
Back to OP -- my answer is yes, this is a source-available service that you can modify and play around with locally. The source and documentation behind the operations of PostHog aren't available.
The math didn't add up for us (I work at PostHog). At the rate we were scaling, we would have needed an entire call center's worth of highly trained Kubernetes support engineers to debug everyone's "my pods just died" / "Kafka just stopped" / "what is Zookeeper" problems.
This stack isn't straightforward to manage, and we couldn't crack the code of doing it at scale for other people without even having access to their systems. There was no malicious intent.
I disagree with the notion that oss is used as marketing bait.
a) offering paid support for bespoke selfhosted installations is an entirely different business model than building a managed service on your oss offering
b) maintaining k8s/helm charts is work - who is paying for that? The selfhosting users certainly aren’t and usually contributions are not enough and even then still need reviews.
You think it’s a deliberate choice.
Yes it’s the choice between going out of business and continuing.
My original comment wasn't intended to indicate that there is an obligation to provide support. The deliberate choice to: a) not offer paid support for open-source deployments, and b) sunsetting the Kubernetes deployments in favor of their cloud version, is a signal that shows PostHog doesn't /really/ want you to be running the software in a self-hosted manner.
Just look at the "Open-source hobby deploy" (from the README in git) which calls out that it "should scale to approximately 100k events per month" but their cloud offering gives you 1 million events per month for free. What is the point of the hobby "deploy"?
Back to OP -- my answer is yes, this is a source-available service that you can modify and play around with locally. The source and documentation behind the operations of PostHog aren't available.