First, I want to give a big thank-you to Bennie Grant, who has been our Interim CEO over the past few months. Stepping into the CEO role is never easy — and doing it on an interim basis can be even tougher. Bennie, we’re grateful for the way you’ve helped steer us through this transition and kept things moving forward when there was a great deal of uncertainty and flux in play.  I am grateful Bennie has agreed to return to his COO role, and appreciate all the leadership stability he provides us with.
Now, onto Peter Farkas — I’m genuinely excited that our Board has chosen Peter as Percona’s new CEO. There are many reasons for my excitement, and I’d love to share a few of them with you.

Technical
I’ve come to believe that if a company wants to be a real thought leader in its technology ecosystem, it needs a truly technical CEO — someone who’s passionate about tech, a real “geek at heart.” Peter fits that perfectly. You’ll see him giving deep technical talks at conferences, and on weekends he’s just as happy tinkering with home automation using Home Assistant or flashing custom firmware onto his wireless router.

Open Source
Open Source is at the very heart of Percona’s DNA, so it’s crucial for our CEO to both understand it and truly care about it — and Peter absolutely does. Many of you know him as the founder and former CEO of FerretDB, a company built to provide an open-source alternative to MongoDB.

Entrepreneur
Peter Farkas is also a true entrepreneur and founder — he started his first company when he was just 14. He’s lived through the ups and downs of bootstrapping more than once. Being a founder is a unique experience you simply can’t get working inside a big corporation.

Percona Values
As many of you know from Peter’s own introduction letter, he was with Percona from 2011 to 2015 as our very first Director of Support. Those were hugely formative years for us — the time when we cemented our uncompromising open-source stance, our deep customer focus, and our drive to find the best solutions for users, not just the most profitable ones. I believe this approach is not only the right thing to do but also gave Percona a significant edge and inspired our customers, community, and staff. Over the past decade, some of that edge may have softened, and I’m confident Peter will help sharpen it once again.

Experience
Peter also spent time in senior leadership at Cloudera while building out a large team there. Cloudera was a major open source “big data” company that was highly successful in its time. That experience gives me confidence that Peter won’t just bring back the best of Percona circa 2015, but will also help guide the much larger Percona of 2025 into its next stage of growth and success.

Working for such an International company while being based in Hungary, also gives Peter a global perspective which is critical for Percona with staff based in over 40 countries.

Heart
Peter combines this with  a genuinely kind heart — he cares deeply about the well-being of our teams, our customers, and the wider community. At the same time, he has a brave heart, he’s courageous when tough decisions need to be made. Those choices aren’t always easy, but Peter has the heart and bravery to make the right ones.

Youth
When we started Percona, I was in my mid-20s — and back then, everyone that age felt perfectly ready for any leadership role. Nearly 20 years later, I sometimes catch myself looking at people that age and, almost unconsciously, thinking of them as “kids.” But I’ve learned that real strength comes from both sides: the hard-earned perspective and judgment that experience brings, and the fresh ideas, curiosity, and fearless appetite for learning that younger leaders contribute. Peter Farkas — younger than me by almost a decade, and younger than many of our senior leaders — is a great reminder that when we trust and learn from the next generation, while sharing the wisdom we’ve gained, we become a stronger, more adaptable company.

Finally, I wanted to share what Tom Basil, our Interim Board Member and before his retirement senior leader at Percona for many years has to say about Peter Farkas:

“In Peter Farkas I find a love for Percona and its people, a zeal for customer service, an intimate knowledge of the open source market, a wealth of entrepreneurial wisdom, and an honest man.  I am grateful he has accepted this CEO challenge, I believe Percona will be better for him, and I ask everyone to lend him their support.”

I’m very much looking forward to the next stage of Percona under Peter Farkas’ leadership. Please join me in welcoming him aboard!

P.S. If you are wondering what’s up with all these wolfs and rabbits – it is about our last names. Farkas means wolf in Hungarian where Zaitsev can be loosely translated as “of Hare” from Russian.

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As you may have heard, ScyllaDB is moving to a Source Available License. Seeing this move from so many companies from MongoDB to Redis should not surprise everyone. This is what happens to “corporate-owned” Open Source Software these days. Yet it is interesting to explore ScyllaDB’s situation in more detail.

First, I think ScyllaDB’s license change is much more similar to MongoDB’s move to SSPL back in 2018, rather than Elastic or Redis license changes. With ScyllaDB using AGPL license its Open Source version already was not “Embedding Friendly” and as such the license change does not pull the rug from so many Independent Software vendors as often happens when software previously licensed under permissive license (APL, BSD, MIT etc) goes source available. 

I’m also aware if there has been a substantial contributor community for ScyllaDB – the number of contributors at Github is 157 as I write this, and most are probably employees and affiliates, compare this to almost 2000 contributors to ElasticSearch

This means it is unlikely ScyllaDB will be forked in any meaningful way as it happened with Redis (Valkey) or ElasticSearch (OpenSearch).

I did a quick poll on LinkedIn and here are the results:

Roughly a third of folks think ScyllaDB will get a serious fork (not just fork on GitHub), I think the probability is much much lower, for the reasons stated.

I think it is also interesting to take a look at what is happening to ScyllaDB popularity per DB-Engines 

First to note DB-Engines measures “Popularity” which does not always correspond to the “Revenue” the technology ecosystem generates. For example, while MongoDB has been in a Down Trend for a while MongoDB Inc revenue is still growing.

What this shows though, is that the fast growth that the Open Source community is so good at supporting is gone. It is natural for a company to shift focus on monetization, to ensure more technology users are paying customers… and also existing customers are paying more because the Source Available “free as in beer” version will be an acceptable alternative for fewer of them.

Something is interesting in the ScyllaDB announcement though – focusing on the single release stream “ScyllaDB Enterprise” which will change from “conventional proprietary” to “source available proprietary”, giving access to Enterprise Features in the free tier – smaller deployments (see FAQ).

This makes ScyllaDB’s Source Available license very different from ones used by MongoDB and Redis – where they tend to focus on a “Non-Compete” angle and their Source Available license allows some users to use software for free at any scale, ScyllaDB basically requires any serious large scale user to have Commercial Enterprise License. This is similar to the CockroachDB approach yet actually less restrictive – allowing for some production use, not just development and prototyping.

It is also interesting to see ScyllaDB’s stated reasons to go source available – it is not “unfair competition” and need for “everyone to pay their fair share” but rather simplifying the development process – no need to maintain multiple versions of multiple components. 

While I do not have any inside information on this topic, I can speculate ScyllaDB is looking for a path to go public and a nice (if short-term) revenue boost this license change can provide can be helpful. 

I’m disappointed that such an awesome piece of engineering is leaving the Open Source ecosystem. This surely leaves a gap and with the ScyllaDB fork unlikely I would not be surprised if some other Open Source solution will rush to fill this space.

As of now though, if you can’t use ScyllaDB anymore because of the license change you may want to re-visit Cassandra, which promises significant performance improvement with Cassandra 5 release, or take a look at YugabyteDB which has Cassandra compatibility.

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I played with the rather unconventional thought of viewing life choices through the mindset of startup investors and bankers. Looking at the difference in risk-taking and potential outcomes of these investment strategies, are there any learnings we can apply to our personal lives? Can we think like a banker if our desired result is that of a startup investor?

Banker mentality focuses on minimizing risk, “preserving capital,” and what many would call a “playing it safe” or “playing not to lose” mentality. I call it “Banker Mentality” because when banks lend someone money, their upside tends to be limited (with relatively low interest rates), and their priority is to ensure they get their money back.

This approach also follows conventional choices, as when the road is well traveled, the perception is that a lot of risk is well known.

The “returns” of such a strategy though are rarely outstanding, you will unlikely 100x your capital by investing in treasuries and AAA bonds, and you also will also unlikely to make the largest difference in your field if you avoid risky choices.

Because such a mentality avoids failure, when it happens they may be affected hard.

Another challenge with “Banker Mentality” is – that we’re going through a period of tremendous change when it comes to politics, international relationships, and of course AI, so what was a very safe choice yesterday… may not be such tomorrow any longer. As someone through lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union I’ve seen firsthand how quickly unthinkable changes can really happen.

Startup Investor Mentality is the opposite, kind of, rather than prioritizing the return of the capital, you prioritize diversification (investing in multiple startups) and the chance of outsized return. For example, one startup investor described their philosophy that 10% of startups they invest in provide 25x return… whereas the other 90% fail or go nowhere – barely returning the capital.

Startup Investor Mentality also means “playing to win”, often going “against the status quo” and picking the road less traveled.

Startup Investor Mentality also deals see failure differently. They like saying “You Win or you Learn” and often expect to fail a lot, making them a lot more resilient. They also tend to think that if you’re not failing in anything you’re not taking enough risks, which are required for greatness.

At the same time, this mentality requires managing failure well – to decide when to persevere and when to give up (or “pivot”) and to fail fast – keeping the cost of failures small from a time and money prospective. 

Think about how “startup investing” works – A company tends to start by raising a little bit of money to reach early-stage success, when larger and larger rounds as it progresses, meaning at the early stage when risks are highest the capital loss is limited.

While it works in investing it is harder to apply in Personal and Professional life – most of us can’t have 10 life partners in parallel or 10 different careers. Yet there is a lot that can be applied too.

For example “trying out” the career you considering early or cutting your losses quickly if it ends up not working for you is a good option.

I also always recommend making sure you put yourself in a position to have options with different companies, industries, and geographical locations. Investing in building your personal brand and investing in networking and people skills (this is especially valuable for folks from the tech industry, where so many focus on their technical skills alone)

While being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, I think this path gives the most flexibility, and something possible to do part-time with your main job to get started.

In the end with enough “diversification” and many “high-risk” bets during your life, you have a high probability of achieving great outcomes in your life and probably have much more “fun” along the way too.

While it may look like the choice between these approaches is “either-or”, it is not. Nassim Taleb has suggested, what he calls “Barbell strategy” where you mix high risk with low risk for optimal outcome. This may mean having some of your capital in low-risk investments such as treasury bonds and index funds and some in highly speculative investments with the potential for great risk.

The same can also be applied to the career – you can keep a safe job while trying to build your first startup on the side, while risks are especially high.

I particularly like this approach to capital allocation to different passive investments, as their performance tends to depend on your emotional attachment.

When I started Percona, though, I put myself in a situation where I had no choice but to succeed. Staring into the abyss brings me the energy to do whatever is needed for success, though I also know many people who find fear paralyzing.

While I do not pretend to know the optimal way of thinking in every situation, I think it is great to stop and think about how you’re approaching the situation and whether it is indeed the optimal way. Way too often, we just follow the inertia of our minds, which can easily lead us astray.

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Open Core is one of the very common ways to build a business around Open Source Software. It goes like this – you have an Open Source version of the software, often called “Community Edition” and there is also an extended version of the software, often called “Enterprise Edition” which is Proprietary software. These days we often see a “Cloud Edition” instead or together with “Enterprise Edition” which as the name says is only delivered as a SaaS product. 

The thing I find different about the Open Core model is how different it can be – you may choose to have an Open Source version that meets the needs of the vast majority of your community or you may have it being little more than a demo version, which is not particularly useful,   let’s name it “Crippled Core”.

An example of good Open Core software in is WordPress where the Open Source version is good enough for the majority of its users, moreover, multiple solutions exist for hosted WordPress, beyond Automatic owned WordPress.com. The opposite example would be Redis Inc., which, before they completely changed the license for Redis (software), essentially made it Open-Core by relicensing Redis Modules, such as RedisJSON.

Being a big fan of Open Source Software, I believe over the long term it is best to choose and invest in fully Open Source Software, yet this will significantly limit of choices.   Besides that, it is reasonable to choose Open Core Software, yet I would avoid Crippled Core software. 

The reason to do that is not simply based on the available functionality – even Crippled Core Software functionality might be good enough for your needs right now, but software creator’s approach to business. If you focus on essentially advertising very limited version as “Open Source” and force most users to become paying customers… such an approach is very little different from Proprietary software with a free demo, and you also should not be surprised if the vendor embarks on more heavy-handed monetization. 

It is great if a company has a policy about what goes in their free version and what does not, which helps users better understand what to expect. One approach that I think has been particularly reasonable is keeping developer-focused features Open, so you can maximize the speed of adoption of software and minimize friction, and when have features related to Security, Compliance, and otherwise “Enterprise Complexity” to Proprietary version – things as fine-grained account security, flexible authentication options, advanced encryption, SSO, auditing, etc. Exotic needs, such as special certifications, support for exotic platforms, and long-term support for old versions is another one. 

There are a few things I would watch in particular while looking at how Good Open Core software is.

• Is the “Community” vs “Enterprise” policy clearly articulated? 
• How many production software users are paying customers? I would expect no more than 10% of the production users to be paying customers if the Community version is actually useful.
• Are there external contributors? How many? A broad contributor base ensures Fork can happen if the vendor becomes unreasonable.
• Are contributions being refused because they compete with the Enterprise Version? Basically is the vendor just has more resources to spend on the Proprietary version (quite expected) or has been intentionally cripping the Open Source edition?

I hope asking those questions can help you to understand your risk and make good choices, even if you’re choosing Open Core Software.

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Can Ignorance be a Business Model? Surely, especially if it is not your ignorance! Counting on ignorance is exactly what many companies in “Open Source” are counting on, in particular ignorance on things like Open Source Licenses and their compatibility. 

You may be surprised how many developers, especially unsophisticated ones, think that if something is on GitHub (you can see the source) it is Open Source and can be used in the project in any way they like.

When starting using “Based on Open Source”, “Open Source Compatible” or just “Open”, highlight some components that are Open Source, and rest assured folks will be confused, just the way you want them to be.

In any serious organization, though, unsophisticated engineers are not the only ones involved in getting code to production. If you’re lucky the license incompatibility will be discovered when it is too late to avoid the dependence on that code, so the only way is to plead with the vendor about the commercial license on the terms they can’t refuse.

If a company is unlucky enough not to spot “non-compliance” before the code gets into production, the Vendor Sales are very likely to discover such non-compliance and have even higher leverage. 

Want to avoid getting into trouble? Fight the ignorance in your team. When it comes to Open Source, ensure developers have the right basic understanding of what Open Source is, understand the license for the code they are looking to use, and have rules in your organization to ensure license compatibility as well as security in your organization.

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