I am a huge apollo fan, but their endgame just became clear, get people using apollo, have those products scale and need monitoring and analytics, charge for said monitoring and analytics. I knew it was coming, just sad that it was all a cashgrab in the end.
Hi sumobob! Sashko here - open source lead at Apollo
I'm glad you've been having a great time using Apollo. I hope we've been up front with the idea that we have commercial products since the start, and I think monitoring and analytics are reasonable places to do that since pretty much all of these services are paid. We also provide paid support to large companies trying to move to GraphQL and Apollo.
On the other hand, I'm excited that having a business model will continue enabling us to build great tools, and open source as much as possible. We've been very careful to make sure that all of our tools are decoupled and flexible, and don't lock you into using any other part of the stack. For example, the monitoring in Engine is based on an open source specification called Apollo Tracing: https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-tracing
In fact you could turn on tracing in your GraphQL server and pipe that data into any service you want, so it's pretty straightforward to avoid using Engine if you don't feel it's a good value for you!
Happy to answer any other questions, we're going to keep working on our stuff!
Sashko
So open source built and invested in to eventually attain money is a bad thing in your opinion? What would that mean exactly? Only large companies that release a few bits as open source is palatable in your opinion? Smaller companies or individuals with a passion and vision for evolving our tools can't structure a strategy to eventually make money from it so they can keep doing it?
At the end of the day, I think it's the perfect model. Especially, when those building the open source, keep what was free before FREE, and simply go even FARTHER to build auxiliary stuff that costs.
This logic just bugs me every time. It's not akin to "selling out" as if you're making art/music, and then you dumb it down for the masses. It's finding the only way to make it work where you can directly and exclusively focus on much-needed tooling, rather than typical non-developer products like Uber or Facebook. And sometimes you don't care about building non-developer products--you just want to build developer tools (because you've gotten obsessed with it and you see what would benefit your fellow developers), and you need to find a way to make a living off of it, or pay the people you've brought on board to attain this long-term vision.
In short, it's a win win for everyone.
And by the way, the fact that you even had to say "[you] knew it was coming" is ridiculous. They at like month 1 of their work on this open source stuff had a paid analytics service. Their paid out service has been out for a very long time. It was as transparent as can be what their strategy is. The amount of work their large team of developers have done could be accomplished no other way.
Ultimately your perspective here, I'm sorry--and this is my perspective--does a lot of harm to the community. If everyone had this perspective in earnest (and I'm not even sure you do), it simply would mean less tools we desperately need. It would be fantastic if we could find more cashgrabs for developers to focus on tooling--there's just so much to be done.
