Backcountry, Bucardo, and Humility
Matt Asay writes on his C|Net blog about a company contributing some code back to the open source community, and then being realistic and humble enough about their efforts to understand only a certain segment of the audience will even care about their contribution.
I say this with a smile on my face, as for once someone contributes something without thumping their chest and trying to make it look like the human race would falter and implode without their colossal efforts.
The open source project that benefits is PostgreSQL, and the most entertaining quote is this one, a comment to the original blog post by a user named elmulfuh:
“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.”
The software they contributed is called Bucardo, which was named after a rather hardy mountain goat. It is a multi-master replication solution that does provide a significant and unique set of features, as evidenced in Backcountry’s press release:
Backcountry.com has been battle-testing Bucardo in live production for nine months. Bucardo has already exceeded the specialty retailer’s expectations, seamlessly shepherding it through its highest traffic day yet of more than 2.35 million page views. That’s approximately 1,600 page views per minute, all managed by Bucardo. Good news since Backcountry.com anticipates traffic levels to surge to near three million page views per day this holiday season.
It is uncommon for a major online retailer to release its internal tools to open source, but as Bresee put it, “The open source community has basically been our sugar mama for years. We’re just stoked to give something back.”
John, I’m just as stoked as you are. Congratulations, and I hope your contributed code finds a great many people willing to help it along. Excellent!