In November last year after nearly two decades at my previous gig, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to work at what seemed to be rapidly becoming an AI-focused company and moved to pgEdge where the focus is well and truly on distributed PostgreSQL and Postgres generally. Distributed databases (and particularly Postgres of course) have always been a passion of mine – even being a key topic of my master’s dissertation many years ago.

Moving to pgEdge was a breath of fresh air. Not only did I get to work with some outstanding engineers and other folks on Postgres, but a good number of them were friends and colleagues that I’d worked with in the past. I’ve since had the privilege of hiring even more colleagues from the Postgres world, and look forward to expanding the team even further with more fantastic engineers from the PostgreSQL and wider database communities.

There was a wrinkle in my ideal view of how things should be though - the key components of pgEdge were “source available” and not Open Source. That means the source code to our replication engine known as Spock and key extensions such as Snowflake which provides cluster-wide unique sequence values and Lolor which enables logical replication of large objects, had a proprietary licence – known as the pgEdge Community License – which allowed you to view and modify the source code, but limited how you could actually use it. 

Well, I’m pleased to be able to say that that is no longer the case. All the core components of pgEdge Distributed Postgres, along with any other pgEdge repositories that previously used the pgEdge Community License have now been re-licenced under the permissive PostgreSQL License, as approved by the Open Source Initiative!

We’re proud to be able to make this change to support Open Source software and contribute to the PostgreSQL ecosystem, and I’m looking forward to seeing us continue to expand our contributions as much as we can.

So, if you want to try out multimaster distributed Postgres, and get involved with the development of the technology, head on over to GitHub and in particular check out the spock, snowflake, and lolor repositories.

If you just want to use the tech without having to build it yourself or are looking for supported builds for production use, then we have cloud, container, and VM options you can try out on our website.