Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially, while FaunaDB and Spanner both seem great, and I love consuming the technical details in articles like these, neither I or my companies are ever going to commit to using something which isn't open source.

I have a real problem understanding why Google (and now FaunaDB) are so clueless and/or inconsistent about software licensing. Google seemed to finally get it with Kubernetes, which has grown into a real and vibrant ecosystem; I will (and do) happily use Google's hosted Kubernetes product, while I know, at the same time, that I am not locked into a single vendor. With Spanner (and FaunaDB), all I get is lock-in. (The cynic in me suspects that Google's open-sourcing of Kubernetes is a cunning strategy to dominate the cloud by commoditizing container orchestration, and thus undermining competitors such as Amazon. After all, it's not like Google is open-sourcing Cloud Storage or BigQuery either.)

The fact that I can't run these products locally on my dev machine is another major downside unrelated to the philosophical aspects of free software.

I'm sure Google and Fauna will make truckloads of money on enterprises that are willing to bet on them, of course. Personally, I am holding out for CockroachDB.

> The fact that I can't run these products locally on my dev machine is another major downside unrelated to the philosophical aspects of free software.

You can't run a full spanner cluster unless you have the Google Hardware. Spanner needs to have an accurate clock with a known error bound. This makes it difficult to open source without open sourcing a bunch of hardware.

> This makes it difficult to open source without open sourcing a bunch of hardware.

That's simply not true; there are many consumer-grade GPS clocks out there well within the bounds that spanner operates (iirc skew bounded at +- 5ms).

Not only that, but you can bet that if spanner were open-sourced, you'd see additional pressure to lower the cost of that hardware.

Not that the answer is any more nefarious: They don't open source it because it extensively uses google-only code, and open sourcing spanner would entail open sourcing many, many other parts of code, which is expensive. It'd be much easier to have something like the dynamo db local front to sqlite3 like amazon offers.

A critical design feature of Spanner is owning the packets end-to-end (as in, between data centers and across oceans). This lets Google minimize the "A" in "CAP", and would be quite difficult to replicate outside of a network like Google's SDN.

Spanner is the software, plus the network, plus the hardware.

(work on Google Cloud)

A very good point.

+ The army of SREs monitoring it...

Understand. Some of the market is committed to open source, and so be it.

Most companies we talk to are more worried about being locked into specific infrastructure than specific software, since they would pay for the enterprise or hosted version of the open source database anyway. FaunaDB solves that problem by not being tied to any specific cloud.

There is a developer edition of FaunaDB on the way that you will be able to run locally for free.

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