PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
Why open source always wins
Open source software ate the world. Most tools we use daily are built in the open: a core team at a company, plus people from the internet who donate time to a project they like. Why do groups that often never meet build Postgres, Zed, Firefox, or Linux?
Engineers care. Great engineers care a lot.
What’s mine is yours
Code that nobody complains about is code nobody uses. With closed source, complaining is mostly all you can do—email, Twitter, cancel the contract—while the fix stays out of your hands. Next to an empty coffee pot, that is one of the most frustrating experiences an engineer can have.
Open source is different. When something is broken, an engineer can fix it. If enough people agree, the change merges upstream and becomes the new norm. Popular open source projects are built better and faster, powered by annoyance and determination. Engineers only fix problems we care about, and problems a lot of us care about get fixed faster. The end result is good software that also happens to be free.
Shoulders of giants
Most of what we do daily is a concrete representation of some general problem solved decades ago. Behind 100k+ lines, PgDog is basically a SQL parser with a hash table—concepts welded together in Rust to solve several problems at once. The value of software does not come from the code itself. It comes from determination to make it work well, and willingness to take responsibility when it does not.
That is why closed source makes little sense to the author: especially with cheap LLMs that can write a lot of code in weeks. AI can’t take ownership of software. Only companies built by people can. Open source has more people who care—built by users who know the problem space.
Making money
How do you build a business if you give PgDog away? Mission-critical software that solves a real problem: companies that give guarantees to customers expect one from vendors. PgDog Enterprise puts the vendor on the hook with a guaranteed 15-minute SLA. Free means freedom to use and choose—not free beer. Engineers know: if you deploy it, you own it—unless you buy support.
PgDog is sharding Postgres. San Francisco-based, hiring founding engineers.