Nostr Web Client

Infrastructure, and usually code powering them is very hard to open source imo. In a way that is useful.

Open source with external users puts an inherent speed limit on how fast you can move and adds maintenance time.

Part of the reason I don’t open source NFDB is commercial, but part of it is also supporting external users and the guarantees needed. It is somewhat complicated to operate without experience, and there can be a lot of breaking changes at times.

Both of these costs are not worth the contributions (most likely none as it is a pretty specific thing).

semisol 2mo ago

I would classify things like NFDB, or any large infrastructure as application specific.

An AS system is usually not useful to anyone except the people it developed it, and the problems it solves at that place. Those usually require hitting a certain scale (one that is low or high depending on the type)

Anyone else that has a similar problem will not be well served by someone else’s AS system, as “similar” is not enough. And they usually have the skills to build their own.

The only people that benefit from open sourcing such a system is people that want to rip off existing effort for a quick buck and don’t care how well it runs or fits them.

For the average user, there are the standard options, that work much better at their scale.

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Discussion

ChipTuner 2mo ago

> Infrastructure, and usually code powering them is very hard to open source imo. In a way that is useful.

> or any large infrastructure as application specific.

Your servers and your network is not my servers nor my network. Your control plane and service discovery (if you have one) might be meant for colo, full cloud, kubs as a service, physical hardware, theres' no point releasing it.

I think many don't admit there is some security through obscurity as well. Knowing long-term topology could allow an attacker to cripple systems more easily

My block storage might be cheaper than yours, my object storage might be cheaper. There are so many differences.

For example,

- my new infra relies on a low latency control plane now, that can't really happen in the cloud

- I have shared storage on a trusted network

just heavily depends on the application and costs involved.