1. Any idea on what should I start next so that I can get acquihired?
2. It looks like Apple didn't get much 'ownership' of OPA in this case, what was the point of purchasing the company as a whole versus simply offering these 3 employees generous sign-on bonuses?
3. Why is it that companies generally tend to pay a lot more per employee in an acquihire scenario?
Excuse me? FDB was a closed source product, and Apple open sourced it under a permissive license and have since spent tens of millions of dollars on maintainers salaries and open sourced all kinds of adjacent software.
How did this idiotic, uninformed meme come about exactly?
This is a very well written announcement. It immediately defines OPA (for people like me who don’t immediately recognize it). It says what’s not changing for people, and says where things will go.
From the post, I'm pretty sure Apple didn't buy Styra. Sounds like Apple hired the maintainers who worked at Styra (including Tim, Teemu and Torin). I'm guessing that Styra is just shutting down.
Seems similar to Apple's 2015 acquisition of FoundationDB -- they sunset the commercial offering. But it's unclear if they acquired Styra or just hired the team?
This is a more defensible take than some on here, but still a wild comparison. FDB was closed source software that existing customers kept source access to the entire time it was closed, and then opened under a permissive license soon after. So yes, you couldn’t buy it, but if you had, you kept access to new development.
It's great to see authorization getting more attention in the mainstream developer conversation.
For folks exploring policy-based authorization solutions, we've written up a detailed comparison between Cerbos and OPA that might be helpful: https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/cerbos-vs-opa
The key differences tend to be around developer experience, policy language complexity, and deployment patterns. Both are solid open source options depending on your specific needs.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 42.1 ms ] threadOPA is a great project and I am glad they are looking to open-source the Enterprise OPA offerings
2. It looks like Apple didn't get much 'ownership' of OPA in this case, what was the point of purchasing the company as a whole versus simply offering these 3 employees generous sign-on bonuses?
3. Why is it that companies generally tend to pay a lot more per employee in an acquihire scenario?
What are the counterexamples, where Apple acquiring a project results in it being more open with sustained development?
How did this idiotic, uninformed meme come about exactly?
Congratulations to the team.
Has anyone seen more options?
I'm maintaining an article about this news (as well as commercial alternatives to OPA) on the Oso blog: https://www.osohq.com/post/opa-maintainers-join-apple-oss-co...
Disclaimer is that I work with Oso :-) but hope it will be helpful regardless.
It's great to see authorization getting more attention in the mainstream developer conversation.
For folks exploring policy-based authorization solutions, we've written up a detailed comparison between Cerbos and OPA that might be helpful: https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/cerbos-vs-opa
The key differences tend to be around developer experience, policy language complexity, and deployment patterns. Both are solid open source options depending on your specific needs.
(Disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Cerbos)