Apple owned-company FoundationDB today announced that the FoundationDB core has been open sourced with the goal of building an open community with all major development done in the open.

FoundationDB, a database company, was purchased by Apple back in 2015. As described in today's announcement, FoundationDB is a distributed datastore that's been designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware.

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By open sourcing the project to drive development, FoundationDB is aiming to become "the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases.

The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of "layers". The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren't possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns.

The fundamental architecture of FoundationDB, including its use of layers, promotes the best practices of scalable and manageable systems. By running multiple layers on a single cluster (for example a document store layer and a graph layer), you can match your specific applications to the best data model. Running less infrastructure reduces your organization's operational and technical overhead.

Following the open sourcing of FoundationDB, the company believes the quantity and variety of FoundationDB layers will develop rapidly. FoundationDB has adopted a new set of project governance rules and a code of conduct for community development.

The source for FoundationDB is available on Github as of today, and those who wish to join the project are encouraged to visit the FoundationDB community forums, submit bugs, and make contributions to the core software and documentation.

Top Rated Comments

casperes1996 Avatar
67 months ago
Yeah just like they open sourced Darwin BSD until they closed it.
[doublepost=1524175372][/doublepost]Is there a front end GUI for the client? I see it uses Java.
I'm happy using MySQL for my large databases and scalability.
Uhmmm. As far as I can tell, Darwin is still open source.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
casperes1996 Avatar
67 months ago
Did not see that coming.
Well, seeing that Darwin and XNU are open source, along with Swift and lots of other stuff, I'm not too surprised.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
lockhartt Avatar
67 months ago
Uhmmm. As far as I can tell, Darwin is still open source.
Yup. Latest release was just 45 days ago.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
usarioclave Avatar
67 months ago
Finally, it's back. The DB sounded really great and solved a lot of interesting problems. Hopefully it'll grow into its own niche.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chucker23n1 Avatar
67 months ago
Yeah just like they open sourced Darwin BSD until they closed it.
They didn’t close Darwin.

Is there a front end GUI for the client? I see it uses Java.
I'm happy using MySQL for my large databases and scalability.
This is for different purposes than MySQL.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
wschutz Avatar
67 months ago
Did not see that coming.
If you can't fight the enemy (aka.. Google Bigtable)... (buy and) open source an alternative? :)

PS: Not the first time (i.e., Turicreate...)
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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