[hardwaresofton]

This is essentially a re-explanation of Neon’s architecture as a blog post.

Amazing that the Postgres ecosystem got this software for “free” (as in at least a basic version of it is F/OSS, IIRC there wasn’t any core bits held back), and the extremely engineer-heavy company got to make money, AND they got bought out in true acquisition style by a larger player that truly benefits from the tech.

The Postgres ecosystem is pretty unique in its ability to produce a “boring” stable product, innovate, stay F/OSS, and create financial outcomes for participants.

[xyzzy_plugh]

As far as I know Neon's open source repositories are no longer being updated/maintained.

[hardwaresofton]

You can't have it all, forever -- the tech is there for anyone to fork and improve, build new businesses (!), inspect, etc. F/OSS is basically a miracle as-is.

If we compare the current state of the world to one in which they were acquired and then continued to put out more F/OSS, things look bad (which I assume is your implication). I choose to instead make the comparison to the world where we never see this tech and it stays proprietary. Sure, eventually someone in F/OSS might have gotten around to building this solution, but they pulled forward the future and we get to see and build on the result for free.

[philippemnoel]

This a 100 times^. The Postgres ecosystem is remarkable and has managed to strike the balance between OSS and commercial successes in a way that most infra verticals have not.

[conradludgate]

(Neon/databricks employee here)

Neon also only just disabled FPWs - so there is new substance here. We published a similar blog on Neon

https://neon.com/blog/turning-off-fpw-for-faster-writes