I think the gp is saying the exact opposite of what you gave an example for, and in line with what you are saying i.e. less technology.
one more thing is you tried both kamal and dokku, and then made a deliberate choice of sticking to k3s because suits you the best rather than making a mindless descision about using k3s, which most people do!
It's not so much that we will prevent individuals from using the product, we are just focusing feature development on the needs of companies and teams. Startups are hard, and you have to focus, and so that's where we are focusing first.
Will you prevent individuals from using the product by requiring a sales call for onboarding? (aka: decisions that have nothing to do with individuals at all, but merely rule them out by intrinsically not being something they can achieve)
As we initially roll out we will be doing that, yes. The reason is that our initial offering is enterprise shaped, and so won't have a self-service onboarding. Eventually we will not require the white gloves, but you have to start somewhere.
I think it's unlikely that individuals will need their product, unless you happen to have a 100 million line monorepo. (At least based on what it sounds like they're targeting.)
Normal Git/JJ is fine for most people, and most open source projects. It's just when you get to the scale of commercial software companies (100+ employees) you run into the classic monorepo/submodule problem.
Monorepos are currently the best solution - they make testing tractable, you can do cross-project changes, Git's support for them isn't buggy as hell. But they have obvious downsides - performance is the big one, but also integration with open source projects, permission control, etc.
So there's this big problem space that really only matters to companies where as far as I know there are currently no good open source or even commercial solutions. The only people that have (maybe) solved it are the mega-corps like Facebook and Google who have made their own private solutions. I don't know exactly what ERSC are going to offer but it's surely going to be in that space and also probably not going to be super relevant to private individuals.
I don't know how experienced you are with jj, but one thing I can say for sure is jj offers significant ux improvements over git and they plan to have a backend eventually. we might see the first implementation from ersc. and from their website I see they are already taking things like agents into account from day one. so we might be in the verge of getting something that scales better with modern day workload?
I like to compare Google and jj to Mozilla and Rust: Google employed Martin and some other maintainers, but it's always been an OSS project under the Apache 2.0 license.
That being said, there's a few things that lead to this perception: the first is that it used to be under Google's GitHub account, but is now under its own org. The second is that contributing to jj does require signing Google's CLA. That is something that is desired to change, but that's up to Google. Due to the license, the community could fork it, and still have the rights to use the code, but that would be pretty aggressive, and so everyone involved would rather work together on this than do so. The move to its own GitHub org was one example of movement in that direction, but I'm not aware of an actual timeline to remove the CLA just yet. The project will figure it out over time.
(I have a commit bit but am not a jj maintainer, so the above is my own impression from being involved in the community for the past few years.)
Maybe if Martin could comment - his @google.com email still appears in the repo readme, I'm assuming he doesn't have access to that box anymore - was the repo move and ownership coordinated with Google prior to his leaving?
The move from martinvonz/jj to jj-vcs/jj happened almost two years ago. https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/commit/b836e0ae9518154cd52f94e0... (from 2024-12-17) says that it was recent at that time. Google were owners even when it was under martinvonz/jj, however.
Because Martin was the lead maintainer and original author and worked at Google for over a decade until like a month ago, and so as a project it fell under their typical standards in the Google OSPO department and had a CLA applied. When it moved orgs, they had to own the org too, so they could keep CLA robot in. That's basically it. It's just a really successful project that has grown far beyond one company or person.
In theory there is now nothing stopping us (the community/project leaders) from just... Moving the repo somewhere else. We could do that. It would be a pretty sudden alienation of other Google contributors though and probably piss off their legal department -- 99% of them just submit regular fixes like any user, because they are ordinary users of JJ. They just happen to work at Google. It would just be stirring up shit for nothing. It isn't an unthinkable outcome, but it isn't one we're just going to "do" for no reason or because it would make people posting on forums happier.
Realistically a non-ownership-assigning CLA on a non-copyleft Apache 2.0 project like in this case doesn't actually mean anything or confer any power. It's all just paperwork that serves as a legal ass covering mechanism because big companies use lawyers. It's like checking the "Yes I am over 18 years old" box on a website. I say this as someone who hates the stupid CLA bot and am a contributor.
As far as actual leadership goes Google does not "own" anything in that regard, nor the day to day work, nor can it really force any of the community to do anything. There's 1 maintainer from Google out of 9 total and +95% of major contributions don't come from Googlers, ERSC, or even any particular company. They don't contribute most of the code, they don't lead most of the community, they are vastly dwarfed by the community in total size, contribution count, etc. What "ownership" or leverage do they have beyond a Github org in this setup? It's annoying but it isn't the same thing as being able to exercise meaningful levers of power, in my experience, and so most of us are just fine with it. Even if there was some stupid bullshit like a disagreement over implied trademark rights, the community could just rename and move on and Google would have nothing. That is where the real power lies.
I'm trying to come from a place of help, truly, so bear with me.
You have to get out from under Google. This would be a red flag during due diligence for many investors.
I'm not saying Google is going to fuck you over but why not just get yourself into a place where you don't need to be writing replies like this, and we don't need to be having this conversation.
And also, I would strongly recommend acquiring trademark rights as soon as possible. If a foundation is formed later you can decide what to do with them, but having them protected is a huge deal.
There's nothing starting me from creating jjhub.com tomorrow and that is a real potential threat for you.
Since I posted previously, I realized I had forgotten trademark entirely, and Google does own the trademark for jj. (See my other comments about the Mozilla/Rust connection, it was the same back then too).
It's not an issue for investors, because again, Google does not own this, and we aren't even modifying jj at this point, and are unlikely to need to. The IP is very clear and not an issue.
> There's nothing starting me from creating jjhub.com tomorrow and that is a real potential threat for you.
That's fine! There's a lot of people already doing this, today. Competition is natural.
My point is not that it is “not Google owned” but to point out the specifics, which really matter. “Google owned” to me implies that they own the copyright to contributions, which they very much do not. That doesn’t mean that they have no control over it at all, of course, but the specific details matter a lot.
Doesn’t really change it at all. Because there’s no copyright assignment, it’s not any different than any other open source project that doesn’t do it, there’s no ownership to actually move. It would just be about socially what is considered upstream.
I like to say AI is like the super soldier serum from the MCU. Teams take it and either become Captain America or Red Skull, it depends on what you were to begin with.
I wish. The "captain Americas" are more like Tony Stark's jury rigged suit used in the desert (for now). It's not the suit truly doing innovation, it's the man inside who knows the suit (and its many limitations/flaws) inside out. Using the strengths long enough to escape before the hunk of metal inevitably fell apart.
Huge moment for the people behind duckdb. I've been using duckdb since the days of its preview releases and I knew they were gonna make it big. So, this one is well deserved. I hope duckdb's governance continues to stay under duckdb foundation.
These days all I see is, people on the sending side produce huge amount of AI generated text with zero understanding and the people on the recieveing side feed that same text into some other (or perhaps same) AI to scavenge meaning from it. And they do this so much so, that I some time wonder, if we could invent a high density wire/binary format for AI outputs and enable direct agent to agent communication to save some energy and bandwidth.
AI is just a good permutation/combination engine that tries to act smart with help of statistics. At best I only see AI as, 1. An autocomplete on steroid, 2. Good search/correlation engine
one more thing is you tried both kamal and dokku, and then made a deliberate choice of sticking to k3s because suits you the best rather than making a mindless descision about using k3s, which most people do!
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