Hey everyone, I'm an engineer at Neon and I wanted to share this FAQ which covers a lot of the questions that are being brought up in the comments here:
https://neon.tech/databricks-faq
We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
That’s a nice FAQ and all but after what happened to bit.io [0] you have to understand why people (like me) are extremely worried about this.
We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a complete about-face a few months or a year later.
I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.
Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.
[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.
Love Neon, but that FAQ is worthless. Every company that gets acquired reassures customers that "nothing will change"... then it does, once the new company is in the acquirer's belly and gets digested.
The FAQ, as meaningless as history as shown it is, is missing one key question: why?
Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?
For what it's worth the questions can't really be answered by a simple FAQ, because history has shown that those answers aren't worth the page they're written on. Many companies that get bought talk all about the fact that nothing is going to change.
Something is always going to change, almost always in a way that impacts customers. In the best case it's something simple like a different name on the bill, other times it will leave customers scrambling for an alternative before a ridiculous deadline. It could happen within weeks, after a month, or it might take a year. The answers at the time of the announcement are the same regardless.