PostgREST is one of my favorite opensource projects. Supabase's success as a billion(?) dollar company is a direct result the great designs of PostgREST and of course Postgres. I don't know the details of the Supabase sponsorship of this project, but I hope its VERY significant. Seeing this project have only 12 paying supporters [1] even though its certainly a core dependency used by at least hundreds of revenue producing companies, makes me very sad at the state of open source financial support.
In situations like that, how does one handle (or plan, if you do, to handle) potential conflict between the company's product plans and what the maintainer believes is right for the OSS?
I just think without some sort of pre-agreement for it, or way of avoiding it, whether intentional or not this way of 'supporting' a project also (or even instead) buys control of it, doesn't it?
(I've never used PostgREST, I'm not referring to anything that may or may not have actually happened, just musing.)
We segregate responsibilities so no one has complete control of the PostgREST project. For example, begriffs[1] is in charge of handling the funds (Patreon), wolfgangwalther[2] owns the .org and .com domains and both are owners of the PostgREST's GitHub org. For development, this ensures I don't go crazy and add some feature that is Supabase-specific, since I'm not the only one who has a say in the project's direction.
This has been working well until now and if you follow PostgREST's development, you'll notice that all enhancements are vendor-neutral and keep the original design.
We're a much smaller team but we took some inspiration from PostgreSQL distributed model (no single company owns development) for this.
i'll ping steve to drop a comment here from his POV. while we don't have anything formal in place, developers are self-managing and make their own choices about the software they are maintaining.
if you know a model that works where we could have clear boundaries, we'd be happy to explore! in the meantime, I hope you can look at the past few years of development to get an appreciation of whether we have maintained an arms-length relationship
steve joined supabase in June 2020 (before our seed round). iirc the project was earning something like ~$300/m in donations which he was splitting between the contributors. it's basically impossible for open source projects to sustain themselves (IMO) through donations
I can already hear the usual bullshit they spout when we're seeing situation like this. "users has no obligation to support you financially, mate." "if you don't like it, don't release your project in permissive license." and many other similar sentences.
Now, I only use agplv3 and similar license. want to use it commercially? pay me 1% of your gross revenue.
1. https://www.patreon.com/postgrest/about