Contributor

Explore the success of OpenTelemetry in the CNCF, the benefits of flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in, and the secrets to maintaining a balance between maintainers and contributors. Learn about Austin Parker's journey into observability, the merger of OpenTelemetry and OpenCensus, and the importance of foundations in supporting open-source projects.

OPAL is an open-source administration layer for Policy Engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA). OPAL provides the necessary infrastructure to load policy and data into multiple policy engines, ensuring they have the information they need to make decisions. Today, we’re talking to Or Weis (@OrWeis), co-creator of OPAL and co-founder of Permit, the end-to-end authorization platform that envisions a world where developers never have to build permissions again.  Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: History of Permit and OPAL The benefits of an open-foundation model rather than open-core RBAC vs ABAC vs ReBAC Why developers would prefer to not have to deal with authorization Or’s own podcast, Command+Shift+Left Links: OPAL Permit Command+Shift+Left Terraform People mentioned: Asaf Cohen (@asafchn) Filip Grebowski (@developerfilip) Other episodes: Open Policy Agent with Torin Sandall Community Driven IaC: OpenTofu with Kuba Martin

FerretDB enables users to run MongoDB applications on existing Postgres infrastructure. Peter Farkas (@FarkasP), co-founder and CEO of FerretDB, explains the need for an open source interface for document databases. Peter also discusses the licensing change of MongoDB and the uncertainty it created for users. He emphasizes the importance of open standards and collaboration among MongoDB alternatives to provide users with choice and interoperability.  Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: The epic mountain adventure that inspired FerretDB Why commercial open-source can be additive rather than extractive How compatibility and open standards drives innovation and competition PDFs as an example of corporation-supported standards Three tenets for building a successful open source project Links: FerretDB Percona People: Peter Zaitsev (@PeterZaitsev)

Ben Johnson, creator of Litestream and LiteFS, talks about his involvement in SQLite development and the challenges of open source contributions. They discuss the different use cases for Litestream and LiteFS, as well as the greater server-side SQLite landscape. Ben also shares his thoughts on the unique contribution policy of SQLite and their personal experiences with disallowing contributions on their own projects.

Lucio Franco, contributor to Tonic and the asynchronous Rust ecosystem, discusses the challenges of async Rust, his plan for getting a job in distributed databases, avoiding power dynamics in the Tokio team, problems in working on open-source in the corporate world, and why he encouraged a collaborator to go on without him.

rqlite is a lightweight, distributed relational database built on Raft and SQLite. Founder Philip O’Toole (@general_order24) decided to combine these technologies while working at a startup years ago. The startup no longer exists, but rqlite is going strong. Today, Philip is an engineering manager at Google, while he continues to be the driving force behind the open development of rqlite. Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: The biggest misconceptions about how rqlite differs from SQLite Why writing databases is more interesting than new programmers might think The tradeoff between a large community versus smaller, more focused leadership Reasons why open-source development progresses in bursts of energy How to really pronounce “rqlite” Links: rqlite InfluxData dqlite Litestream libSQL Turso OpenTelemetry People: Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) Other episodes: libSQL with Glauber Costa

Kuba Martin, Software Engineering Team Lead at Spacelift and Interim Tech Lead of OpenTofu, the open-source fork of Terraform, discusses how OpenTofu handled licensing and copyright, benefits of a technical steering committee, recreating the community registry, and more.

Ry Walker (@rywalker) is the founder and CEO of Tembo, the Postgres developer platform for building any and every data service. To Ry, the full capabilities of Postgres appear underappreciated and underused for most users. Tembo is an attempt to harness the large ecosystem of Postgres extensions, and ultimately collapse the database sprawl of the modern data stack.  Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: Taking the “red pill” of using Postgres for everything Providing universal support for Postgres extensions Why Ry dislikes the current state of the modern data stack How databases across the board have mostly changed into application platforms What makes Tembo “Startup Mt. Everest” Links: Tembo OSSRank Citus Data Modal Supabase Wrappers People mentioned: Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson) Other episodes: Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov

Jan Oberhauser, founder and CEO of n8n, brings his background in film effects to create a unique workflow automation tool. He discusses how n8n’s flexible architecture allows for complex automations and addresses the challenges of traditional automation tools. Jan explains the innovative 'fair-code license' that balances open-source ideals with project sustainability. He also shares insights on building a vibrant community around n8n, illustrating use cases from scheduling fitness classes to upgrading financial systems.

Glauber Costa (@glcst) is the founder of Turso and the co-creator of libSQL, an open source, open contribution fork of the database engine library, SQLite. Most people believe that SQLite is open-source software, but it actually exists in the public domain and doesn’t accept external contributions. With their big fork, Glauber and his team have set out to evolve SQLite into a modern database with support for distributed data, an asynchronous interface, compatibility with WASM and Linux, and more. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Community reactions to forking SQLite How Glauber was spoiled by starting his career developing for Linux The controversial decision to launch libSQL without writing a single line of code The plan for incorporating upstream changes from SQLite Examples of how application developers need to move code “to the edge” Links: libSQL SQLite Turso LiteFS Litestream rqlite VLCN People mentioned: Avi Kivity (@AviKivity) Dor Laor (@DorLaor) Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) Phillip O’Toole (@general_order24) Matt Tantaman (@tantaman) Other episodes: Scylla with Dor Laor  Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin