The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The relicensings will continue until morale improves (News)

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

HashiCorp adopts a Business Source license, Matt Rickard hypothesizes why Tailwind CSS won, WarpStream sets out to make a Kafka-compatible offering directly on S3, Vadim Kravcenko publishes an excellent guide for managing difficult software engineers & Russ Cox gives an update on Go 2.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 14th, 2023. Adam and I are stoked to join Randall Munroe, Julia Evans, Scott Hanselman, and many more at the very last Strange Loop conference in St. Louis, Missouri on September 21st and 22nd. Are you going to be there? Leave us a comment and we'll make sure to connect. Okay, let's get into the news. HashiCorp co-founder Armin Dadgar announces their future is not open source. It's business source. Quote, our open source model has been made possible by the thousands of commercial

customers who partner with us on their mission critical infrastructure. We invest tens of millions of dollars in research and development in our open source products annually and our commercial efforts enable us to continue to support and sponsor our vibrant community of users. However, there are other vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models and the community work on OSS projects for their own commercial goals without providing material contributions back. We don't believe this is in the spirit of open source. End quote. Much like other companies who have adopted similar licensing schemes before them,

such as Sentry, Cockroach Labs, MariaDB, to name a few. Here's the kicker. Quote, vendors who provide competitive services built on our community products will no longer be able to incorporate future releases, bug fixes, or security patches contributed to our products, end quote. Reactions to this change in direction have been all over the board, as you might expect, but one thing is for sure. Each open source business that makes this move paves the way for the next. What will the open source landscape look like in five years time? I'm glad we have Red Monk's Steven O'Grady coming on the show next week to talk through all the angles of this

ongoing and concerning discussion. In a brief post on his blog, Matt Rickard lays out four bolted point hypotheses on why he believes Tailwind CSS has become the new ubiquitous front-end framework. One, no context switching from application logic. Two, it's copy and pasteable. Three, fewer dependencies, smaller surface. And four, reusability. Now, winning is both a subjective thing and a temporary thing, but I have to admit it has more momentum than any other CSS tooling right now. But the main reason I share this post is because when you just look at those bullet points, each of which, of course, Matt expands on in his post,

they are highly desirable attributes of any software project. So if you want your software to, quote, win, whatever that means to you, maybe emulate some of these winning characteristics from Tailwind. Kafka is dead. Long live Kafka. That's the name of the post by Richard Artoole announcing WarpStream, a Kafka-compatible data streaming platform directly on top of S3. Richard says, quote, It's delivered as a single, stateless Go binary, so there's no local disk to manage,

no brokers to rebalance, and no zookeeper to operate. WarpStream is 5 to 10 times cheaper than Kafka in the cloud because data streams directly to and from S3 instead of using inter-zone networking, which can be over 80% of the cost of a Kafka deployment at scale, end quote. Kafka is a powerful tool that's used by tons of tech companies. In fact, it's deployed by over 80% of Fortune 100s. But the words simple and cheap are not ones you'll hear associated with the open source event streaming platform.

WarpStream aims to simplify and cheapen the whole endeavor, but they're up front with the trade-offs. They say, of course, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Engineering is about trade-offs, and we've made a significant one with WarpStream. Latency. It's that time again. Time for sponsored news. Just like us here at Changelog,

Tailscale has never supported password-based authentication. Unlike us here at Changelog, Tailscale now supports Passkeys. What's Tailscale? It is the simplest way to give secure remote access to shared resources. It's for teams, for enterprise, and for individuals. And here's how Passkeys work with Tailscale. To add a user with a Passkey to your tail net, if you're an admin, you can generate an invite from the users page of the admin console. Click invite users, then invite via link, and select the role you like the invited user to have.

Then share that unique invite URL with the user. When the invited user opens a link, they'll be able to create a unique username and join your TailNet. It's that easy. Passkeys are awesome, and every company that adopts them adds to the awesome. Thanks, TailScale, for supporting Passkeys and for sponsoring Changelog News. Learn more at changelog.com slash tailscale. Once again, changelog.com slash tailscale.

Vadim Kravchenko published an excellent guide for working with and managing the many personas of software engineers. Vadim says, quote, In the grand scheme of a software engineering path, there's a thread that weaves through every project, every failure and every challenge. That thread is people. As a person with an engineering background, I do enjoy solving hard puzzles and fixing problems. But the most complex, intriguing and ultimately rewarding aspect of my journey has always been managing people, end quote. Check the link because this is a deep dive. He has specific advice for managing the procrastinator, the lone wolf, the negative Nancy, the know-it-all, the... you get the point. Russ Cox in a blog post highlighting some of the boring new features in Go 1.21 that improve compatibility says, quote, when should we expect the Go 2

specification that breaks old Go 1 programs? The answer is never. Go 2, in the sense of breaking with the past and no longer compiling old programs, is never going to happen. Go 2, in the sense of being the major revision of Go 1 we started toward in 2017, has already happened. There will not be a Go 2 that breaks Go 1 programs. Instead, we are going to double down on compatibility, which is far more valuable than any possible break with the past. In fact, we believe that prioritizing compatibility was the most important design decision we made for Go 1. As boring as it might sound, compatibility is a killer feature for a mature, widely deployed platform like Go. That's the news for now, but definitely skim through this episode's companion newsletter. It has three more big stories, a list of eight other things on our radar, and all the recent good pods from us here at Changelog.

Speaking of good pods, we're celebrating 30 years of Debian with Project Lead Jonathan Carter on Wednesday. And we're talking intergenerational conflict among software devs with our friends Justin Searles and Landon Gray from Test Double on Friday. So subscribe to the Changel Log if you haven't yet. Stay tuned for more podcasting goodness. Have a great week and share the show with your friends who might dig it. I'll talk to you again real soon.