An open-source web moocher comes clean

Backcountry.com has been using open source for years. Last week, it finally gave something back. Unlike other web properties that have built their businesses on open source but acknowledge little need to contribute back, Backcountry.com has also given little back...but at least takes no pride in it. In fact, its press release announcing the code contribution is hilariously self-flagellating:

After mooching off the open source world for 10 years and making millions, Backcountry.com finally threw the Postgres community a bone in the form of a database synching tool curiously called Bucardo....

Designed and named (apparently after an extinct, wiry mountain goat) specifically for Backcountry.com by End Point Corporation, Bucardo allows seamless real-time synching of multiple databases. If millions of users are hitting the same database at once, it slows down the process. Because Bucardo synchs both multi-master and master-slave databases, Postgres users can now spread hits and optimize traffic and bandwidth. Basically this means smooth, easy surfing with minimal latency. It?s all about efficiency and speed.

When asked why this is remotely interesting, End Point developer Greg Sabino Mullane said, "I'll be honest with you: this isn't earth shattering. Oracle can do it, and you can kind of do it with MySQL. But while there are plenty of Postgres replication systems out there, this is the first that lets you synch multi-masters in real time. So yeah, when you look specifically at Postgres, this is a pretty big deal."

Candor, thy name is Backcountry.com!

So, it's not an earth-shattering code contribution, but it reflects something that many of us have been saying for some time: "Web 2.0" companies who think they're above the open-source law are, and their contributions just might not be useful to 99.99999% of the code-consuming public. But for that 0.00001% that does care about such things, it's manna from heaven.

In fact, Backcountry.com's CEO says just this: "It's not for everyone, but it's revolutionary for people who are really into this stuff."

Exactly.

As more of the world moves to the web, this "revolutionary for people who are really into this stuff" principle will come to matter more and more, because more and more people will be "into this stuff." Now we just need to develop open-source licenses that encourage candid laggards like Backcountry.com to contribute back the great code they borrow and modify.

[tristanbob]

Neat story

What a neat story! Thanks for sharing this. How does this new project compare to Continuent, the commercial open source project you mentioned on this blog?

http://www.continuent.com/

Tristan

[mogmios]

Giving back is good for business.

One thing I've learned is that in business advertising is important but expensive. If I can take some code that isn't strategic to my business and release it under an open source license it's great for me. I get lots of high quality links coming to my site and lots of visitors that might otherwise never have known I existed. All that practically for free! You can't get much better than that.

The current website I've been working on, a plumbing eCom site [http://www.plumbersstock.com/], has produced a lot of code that we use to tie into a popular enterprise app, Activant (formally Intuit) Eclipse, for managing inventory, sales, etc. This hasn't been an easy thing to do so while few people will appreciate this code those that do will probably appreciate it a lot. In the very near future we plan to start releasing bits of useful code as well as documentation on how to use it. If there is enough interest we may even be able to spin off support for using this code into it's own company.

Releasing code to others might seem a waste of effort but it can have many benefits. Sure it may not be the next Firefox but it can still be useful to someone.

[elmuhfuh]

correct me if im wrong

If anyone was borrowing and modifying code it would have been End Point Corporation. However, you made it perfectly clear that they developed a new solution, named after a mountain goat, to suit their needs. You should get to work on those open-source licenses that encourage sharing rather than just mooching off the ones that are already there.

[davejenk1ns]

Bucardo is good mojo

I was CTO at Backcountry.com while this was being developed. The company was strong on open source since the beginning, and as the needs got larger and larger, so did the needs for powerful database goodness as well as redundancy and resiliancy. The master-master replication formed the central core to the strategy to meet these requirements.

End Point did a fantastic job with the work-- wholly commissioned by backcountry.com. For anyone who is concerned about the citizenship of End Point-- don't worry. The contributors are all core contributors and kernel tenders for their various areas: postgresql, interchange, and the random presentation-layer driver here and there.

See more at www.bucardo.org or my profile at www.davejenkins.com