I would never, ever want to take food out of aphyr's mouth, but is there something specific that makes either just creating the Jepsen tests somehow out of reach of a sufficiently motivated contributor, or is so prohibitively expensive that a "gofundme-ish" setup wouldn't get it done?

I (perhaps obviously?) am not well-versed in that space to know, but when I see "wish $foo would pay for" my ears perk up because there is so much available capital sloshing around and waiting on Apple to do something is (in my experience) a long wait

I have heard from people who paid for a Jepsen test that he is eye wateringly expensive (and absolutely, rightfully should be, there are very few people in the world that can conduct analyses on this level) but maybe achievable with a gofundme.

I am not sure, for the same reason, that designing a DIY Jepsen suite correctly is really achievable for the vast majority of people. Distributed systems are very hard to get right, which means that testing them is very hard to get right as well.

He provides a good and unique service. He's worth every penny. Note that for some companies, the real "expense" is dedicating engineering hours to fix the shit he lit on fire in your code.

To be fair, it was already on fire, you just didn't know it yet!

So true!

> is there something specific that makes either just creating the Jepsen tests somehow out of reach of a sufficiently motivated contributor

Skill and capabilities, I believe. Very, very few people have an understanding of distributed databases on his level. And most people don't even realize how much they don't know.