Tests Are The New Moat
10 points by alper
10 points by alper
I think "new" is overstating it. For a famous example: sqlite is public domain software and has been for years. Their moat has long been their proprietary tests that are only available with a very large contract.
The author gives that exact example in the artcile
Ah. I tapped out during the cloudflare/vercel section. It seems odd for them to call this "new" then.
I think it's noteworthy if more projects start following suit (such as tldraw in the bottom of the article).
I think it's noteworthy if more free (libre) projects are considering it. For tldraw, specifically, though, their license is already proprietary. That they're making some of their formerly public proprietary files now non-public doesn't really move the needle, IMO.
SQLite can have a private test suite because it's developed by ~three people. For a large open source project, making the suite private means outside contributors can't contribute new tests or run existing tests before making a PR. I don't think that's an impossible challenge, but I don't immediately see how to solve it, either.