Open Source Databases: The Unknown Community

The text discusses the challenges of understanding the usage patterns and popularity of open-source projects like databases. It mentions that metrics such as downloads, GitHub forks, and social posts may not accurately represent real product usage. The author proposes collecting statistics from running Aerospike clusters to better understand usage patterns, system behavior, cluster topologies, and other hard metrics. They also discuss the importance of privacy and anonymization in data collection. The text concludes by emphasizing the need for better data to improve open-source projects like Aerospike.