Giving Thanks to Open Source Software Contributors
Open source software (OSS) is the backbone of innovation. Building and releasing software would be a dramatically different process without the incredible contributions of the open source community — the many open-source-based tools that support development and release as well as the open source code bases and frameworks that enable developers to “stand on the shoulders of giants.”
However, open source contributors rarely get the recognition they deserve. That’s why ScyllaDB wanted to take the occasion of American Thanksgiving to express our gratitude to open source contributors everywhere. Whether you’ve built an open source tool or framework that ScyllaDB engineers rely on, you’ve helped shape our open source code base, or you’re advancing another amazing open source project, we thank you.
ScyllaDB’s engineering team is especially grateful for the following open source tools and frameworks:
- GCC, an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating system
- Linux kernel, the open source operating system kernel that powers the ongoing revolution in cloud computing.
- Ninja, a small build system with a focus on speed
- Golang, an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.
- Git, a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency
- Grafana, an open source observability solution for every database.
- Prometheus, an open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time series database and modern alerting approach
- Kubernetes, powering planet-scale container management
- Debezium, the open source platform under the hood of our CDC Kafka Connector
- Tokio, a framework at the heart of our Rust driver
- Wireshark, an open source “sniffer” for TCP/IP packet analysis
We also want to highlight how open source contributions have enabled many great things. For example, if you’ve ever contributed to the Seastar framework or Scylla database projects, or even one of our shard-aware drivers, you can take pride in knowing that your work is benefitting applications that:
- Accelerate pharmaceutical discovery by enabling unprecedented views of biology
- Help people build relationships globally and remain connected virtually
- Provide extremely flexible options for the new realities of travel
- Stop cybersecurity attacks before they can do damage
- Reduce traffic accidents through predictive driver alerts
- Produce AI-driven health insights to improve patient care
- Enable law enforcement to track, arrest, and prosecute child predators
- Harness the power of IoT to provide renewable energy and manage natural resources more sustainably
That’s just a small sampling of the positive impacts made possible by the contributors to ScyllaDB and Seastar open source projects — and that’s just a tiny sliver of the contributions made to the global open source community over the past decades. The overall value of open source contributions is immeasurable but certainly immense.
To every person who’s ever submitted a bug report, committed a bug fix, extended an existing open source project, or took the initiative to start a new one: we truly appreciate your efforts. Thank you for taking the time to contribute, and never lose that spirit of innovation.