Apple Open Sources FoundationDB (macrumors.com)

Apple's FoundationDB company announced on Thursday that the FoundationDB core has been open sourced with the goal of building an open community with all major development done in the open. The database company was purchased by Apple back in 2015. As described in the announcement, FoundationDB is a distributed datastore that's been designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware. Mac Rumors reports: By open sourcing the project to drive development, FoundationDB is aiming to become "the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases: "The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of "layers". The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren't possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns. The fundamental architecture of FoundationDB, including its use of layers, promotes the best practices of scalable and manageable systems. By running multiple layers on a single cluster (for example a document store layer and a graph layer), you can match your specific applications to the best data model. Running less infrastructure reduces your organization's operational and technical overhead." The source for FoundationDB is available on Github, and those who wish to join the project are encouraged to visit the FoundationDB community forums, submit bugs, and make contributions to the core software and documentation.

Comments

Same issue as CUPS:

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really want to be making Apple products better FOR FREE?

Because if you provide code under a contributor license agreement to them, that is what you will be doing.

How is it free?

[SuperKendall]

Do you really want to be making Apple products better FOR FREE?

The point of Open Source is that EVERYONE gets a better product "for free" because by contributing changes Apple benefits - but so do you, or anyone else that chooses to use the code. Why would you choose to contribute if you were not also benefitting to begin with?

In fact in a very real sense Apple is not getting anything "for free". There is very real time that Apple is paying for, that has gone into building this system that Apple has opened, and also Apple is paying for time to monitor and curate and test contributions. All of that takes time and money and is not "free", far too many people think of actual code as the beginning and end but it is just a tiny part of a more complex puzzle.