[HN Gopher] Show HN: OpenSnowcat - A fork of Snowplow to keep op...
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Show HN: OpenSnowcat - A fork of Snowplow to keep open analytics
alive
I've been a long-time Snowplow user and unofficial evangelizer. I
have deep respect for its founders, Alex and Yali, who I met a few
times. What made me fall in love with Snowplow was that it was
unopinionated, gave access to raw event data, and was truly open
source. Back in 2013, that changed everything for me. I couldn't
look at GA the same way again. Over the years, analytics moved
into SQL warehouses driven by cheaper CPU/storage, dbt,
reproducibility, and transparency. I saw the need for a
democratized Snowplow pipeline and launched a hosted version in
2019. In January 2024, Snowplow changed its license (SLULA),
effectively ending open-source Snowplow by restricting production
use. When that happened, I realized the spirit of open data and
open architecture was gone. A week later, I forked it, I wanted to
keep the idea alive. OpenSnowcat keeps the original collector and
enricher under Apache 2.0 and stays fully compatible with existing
Snowplow pipelines. We maintain it with regular patches,
performance optimizations, and integrations with modern tools like
Warpstream Bento for event processing/routing. The goal is simple:
keep open analytics open. Would love to hear how others in the
community think we can preserve openness in data infrastructure as
"open source" becomes increasingly commercialized. That's it, I
should have posted here earlier but now felt right.
Author : joaocorreia
Score : 38 points
Date : 2025-10-23 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (opensnowcat.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (opensnowcat.io)
| c0balt wrote:
| Interesting post, minor note on the homepage: The first two boxes
| for "Trusted by" above software.com are shown as empty for me.
|
| Browser is Firefox on Android, tested without adblocker
| joaocorreia wrote:
| thanks will check!
| whalesalad wrote:
| I genuinely thought software.com was like a lorem ipsum
| placeholder (particularly in the context of the other two being
| blank). Went to the site ... it feels even more like a fake
| company. There is so much here but it all feels like an empty
| shell?
| joaocorreia wrote:
| Hahaha no software.com is a real company, and they do use
| opensnowcat!
| joaocorreia wrote:
| Fixed! Thank you!
| wezell wrote:
| Love this, will take a look. Good luck on your open source
| journey.
| joaocorreia wrote:
| Thank you!
| tayloramurphy wrote:
| Big fan of what you're doing Joao! Keep up the great work :)
| joaocorreia wrote:
| Thank you Taylor!
| loodish wrote:
| I understand that being a fork of Snowplow is how you define
| yourself, but there's actually nothing on the webpage that
| provides any detail of what the product does, other than "event
| pipeline" right up the top.
|
| I suggest putting at least some content on the website about what
| you do so that people can find you when looking for solutions in
| the industry, rather than having them adopt Snowplow and then
| splinter off later. I understand that your main focus is
| snowcatcloud.com which does have info putting some on
| opensnowcat.io will greatly enhance its discoverability.
|
| Especially as the splinter strategy is going to become
| increasingly harder as people who care about open source won't
| adopt Snowplow to begin with, and people who don't care won't
| leave it.
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(page generated 2025-10-23 23:00 UTC)