Re: Thought provoking piece on NetBSD

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 11:03, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:41:41 -0700,
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > In general, I think that people who harp on PostgreSQL's lack of a
> > benevolent dictator as an inhibitor to progress are people who are not
> > comfortable with democracy and are looking for excuses why company X needs
> > to "take over the project for its own good."
>
> I think Postgres is best described as ruled by an Oligarchy. I would expect
> a democracy to at least include all of the developers in votes. However
> when things are decided by a vote rather than consensus it is core that votes.
> (I think Debian would be a good example of an open source project run as a
> democracy.)
>
> On a related comment to that story, there have been a fair number of people
> stating that they think the GPL vs BSD license has been very important in
> getting companies to give back to the project. I think Postgres has done quite
> well with having companies give back code and resources to the project and
> makes a good counter example to these claims. There probably are some license
> effects, but other things also affect companies' decisions on giving back
> to projects they benefit from.

I think that with either the GPL or BSD, code is returned under a type
of coercion. Not necessarily a bad thing, understand.

The coercion of the GPL is legalistic. If you distribute GPL stuff,
you've got to give out the source code with it. So, you might as well
give it to the community at large. With BSD, it's more that you'd be
cutting yourself off from the community at large if you didn't return
the code. So, the coercion is much more subtle. It's much easier to
donate your code to the project and let other people maintain it then to
try and maintain your own fork of the code and cross patch their changes
into your own.

I generally find the BSD license easier to sell to bosses, for sure.