▲ 4 ▼ Considering the Community Effects of Introducing an Official MongoDB Go Driver

What do you do when an open-source project you rely on no longer meets your

needs?  When your choice affects not just you, but a larger community, what

principles guide your decision?

Submitting patches is often the first option, but you're at the mercy of

the maintainer to accept them.  If the changes you need are sweeping,

substantial alterations, the odds of acceptance are low.  Eventually, only

a few realistic options remain: find an alternative, fork the project, or

write your own replacement.  Everyone who depends on open source faces this

conundrum at one time or another.

After relying for years on the community-developed mgo Go driver for

MongoDB, MongoDB has begun work on a brand-new, internally-developed,

open-source Go driver.  We know that releasing a company-sponsored

alternative to a successful, community-developed project creates tension

and uncertainty for users, so we did not make this decision lightly. We

carefully considered how our choice would affect current and future Go

users of MongoDB.