Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0]

It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business?

Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it hasn't be very, let's say, ethical.

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  0: https://opencollective.com/localstack#category-ABOUT

I evangelized localstack at my company a while back, but as we integrated it deeper into our CI test runs we started running into more and more things they don't support, and it feels impossible to get any attention from their support/devs despite being paying customers.

Their Cloud Pod and ephemeral instance features in particular feel pretty half-baked and not very useful at the moment.

Fun tangent: it's pretty easy to write a crack for the pro version; we actually used that for about a month as a pilot to confirm that it would do what we needed it to.

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free.

It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

Did localstack never get bit enough that a fork would emerge or am I missing an obvious one?

What are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS emulation.

Complete coincidence but today I was looking for an AWS mock for E2E tests. Not the whole AWS footprint but just a few services and looked at LocalStack for the first time.

It took Claude to put together a service (with web interface and everything) for those 2 services 15 mins.

I’m not claiming my experience is translated universally but perhaps if your core competency is something like LocalStack you need to think about alternative business ideas.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"