You assume too much, brother. 
Open source for a business that may support hundreds of thousands of users? Ouch, no wonder updates and new features are slow.
Actually open source in many cases is far better than commercial software for rapid evolution. Many of the NoSQL DBâs and cockroach, MySQL are open source. Facebook open sources a lot of their frameworks. Even many financial institutions use open source for certain elements of their stack⌠in part because of security and scalability and reliability.
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I wouldnât assume anything. Roon makes a dogâs breakfast of finding as fundamental piece of music as âKind of Blueâ. Even if it is using the latest DB technology itâs clearly not using it very effectively.
Amazon does a good job of finding all the versions of Kind of Blue it sells, btw.
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I know, there are many examples. I worked for a fortune 100 company and they always used big companies for software. I think they were using ASP C something.
If you use AT&T for comm lines and it goes down itâs hard to complain about them but if you use XYZ Comm lines when it goes down, everyone is saying, who is XYZ.
They should be using MS, Oracle or some company like that.
Wow. Just, wow.
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Thatâs only the best selling jazz album of all time.
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I refer all to this section of the LevelDB Wiki -
Explains a lot.
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Lol, really?
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Roon finds Kind of Blue for me first time everytime so no idea whatâs going on with that search for some people.
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There was an issue, but it has been fixed.
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I tried it before the fix though.
Opensource does not have to have bad quality.
There are a lot, really a lot of very very high quality projects around.
That have said, also a lot of problematic projects, unfortunately.
We, the âcompanyâ i work in, 100000+ users, use a lot of opensource technology, among them databases.
No issues with them, but choose the opensource projects you wish to use wisely.
Using the latest DB technology does not necessarily make a better product for the end user.
It is how you use technology; use software and hardware that supports the kind of business you are doing and implement it âcorrectlyâ.
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You would be surprised how many huge businesses use OpenSource to support millions of people. Let me think of few examples:
Google:
Microsoft:
MercedesBenz uses Free and Open Source software within several of its products:
Apple:
etc⌠etc.
âŚand if you have on Android mobile phone: Android is based on the open source Linux operating system.
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I understand but I worked for a fortune 100 company for 40 years and they would never consider using open source for any critical system. Access to the highest levels of support was very important. The DB Roon uses is everything to them and in my opinion they should be using fully supported commercial software. I know there is support for open source but itâs not the same.
Anyway, Roon has been quiet for a while, I suspect there is a big release coming.
Thanks
So did I, and neither would my company. We had specific governance rules to prevent this, and as an IT Architect one of my responsibilities was to ensure that our software designs didnât breach our governance rules.
However, Roon is very far from being, and never will be a Fortune 100 company. It is surely very logical that Roon saves some money by using (hopefully) âgoodâ open source software.
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I guess my point is that if Roon is serious about changing the world by the way we listen and manage our music then they should be using different software. Or, are they hoping to get bought?
I wouldnât equate open-source with bad support. There are multiple fortune 100 retailers (Not to mention social media companies) whose stacks are fundamentally oriented towards open source. To varying degrees of course. They all have principles about total cost of ownership, resilience, reliability, scalability, etc. and they have in certain cases decided that itâs better to be on open source. I donât want to make it an abstraction - there are plenty of cases where being on a product like MySQL trumps Oracle, MS-SQL, or any of the other pieces of relational data base enterprise material for a whole host of reasons. You need support, disaster recovery, fault tolerance (given your hosting arrangement). Saying âgood governance would never allow open sourceâ to me has echoes of âonly buy Fordâ. There are different models. Some companies hire their own experts on the open source projects so they are their own support, some buy support, some take risks others wouldnât, some even create their own forks or versions of the open source project and run it internally which means they own the software. Amongst fast growing web stack companies (eg, linked in, FB, Amazon, Google, Slack, Wayfair, Airbnb, Lyft) and âolder guard companies looking to emulate the success (MSFT, Target, WalMart) this is increasingly the norm as a way of getting increased velocity.
Itâs not a matter of âonly do Xâ. There are plenty of companies of the scale of Roon that make well-informed decisions to live primarily on open source, and they donât have more or worse down time or feature failure rates. I think once youâve seen large scale production errors with vendor support chasing things they donât understand, and your own team is the one who comes up with the solution explaining the chain of causation to the vendor more than once, you begin to see some of the appeal to open source for some components. Itâs all trade-offs, and rarely is the answer 100% one or the other. But Iâd be shocked if any modern stack (eg recently founded in last ~decade) didnât have major components running on open source, and rightly so. And data stack is one of those areas where you see open source more and more - things like big query, aurora, redshift etc are lovely to start on and convey big speed advantages, but their cost unfortunately scales as your business does, and one of the promises of web stack is that you get cost leverage. So thereâs a trade-off.
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Rather than yelling at the cloud(s), what would be tremendously helpful is if you took the time to explain, based on your years of experience, why exactly the DB software that Roon uses is inferior to other solutions you have experience with, and how they could improve their user basesâ experience by switching.
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Sorry, but I am entitled to an opinion. And I do think ASP.NET with sequel is a better option. Better support and rapid development.
Thank you and have a great day.
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