March 26, 2021

Open source, not open contribution

1 hour 22 minutes

This week we’re talking with Ben Johnson. Ben is known for his work on BoltDB, his work in open source, and as a freelance Go developer. Late January when Ben open sourced his newest project Litestream in the readme he shared how the project was open source, but not open for contribution. His reason was to protect his mental health and the long term viability of the project. On this episode we talk with Ben about what that means, his thoughts on mental health and burnout in open source, choosing a license, and the details behind Litestream - a standalone streaming replication tool for SQLite.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit.

Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog

Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to [email protected] to get your free credits.

LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.

Featuring:

Ben Johnson – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Go Beyond

Open source, but closed to contributions

Litestream.io & benbjohnson/litestream

Litestream getting started

The Changelog #201: Why SQLite succeeded as a database with Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite

SQLite copyright

SQLite - Professional Support & Extension Products

boltdb/bolt

Kubernetes Failure Stories

The Changelog #170: BoltDB, InfluxDB, Key-Value Databases with Ben Johnson

Cockroach Labs

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

...more

View all episodes

By Changelog Media