Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Increased company involvement

["Andy Astor" <andya(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>]

> > However, there was a lot of coordination that happened with Fujitsu
that
> > I don't see happening with the current companies involved.
Companies
> > are already duplicating work that is also done by community members
or
> > by other companies.
> 
> That is bound to happen no matter what. Look at plJava and plJ. Some
> people just feel that their way is better. Some people just don't get
> along etc...
> 
> That is why we have 80 Linux distributions and a dozen FreeBSD
> distributions (can I include MacOSX?).

True enough. And coordination, just like other outward-facing
activities, is often inconvenient and easy to forget. But it's
important. I've just left the Board of Directors of the Web Services
Interoperability organization (WS-I). Coordinating the standards
activities of IBM, MS, Sun, Oracle, BEA, Fujitsu, SAP, and 130 others
takes enormous time and care, but it's the only way coop-etors can
function.

And having said that, aggressive businesspeople will move too quickly at
times, or will hide their activities for business reasons. It's a mostly
forgivable sin, IMO.

> > Second, some developers are being hired from the community to work
on
> > closed-source additions to PostgreSQL.  That is fine and great, but
one
> > way to kill PostgreSQL is to hire away its developers.  If a
commercial
> > company wanted to hurt us, that is certainly one way they might do
it.
> > Anyway, it is a concern I have.  I am hoping community members hired
to
> > do closed-source additions can at least spend some of their time on
> > community work.
> 
> I would think that most of the developers would stipulate that in
order
> to take the position??? I know Command Prompt would always make sure
> that the developer could work on the community stuff.

The same is true for EnterpriseDB.

> > And finally, we have a few companies working on features that they
> > eventually want merged back into the PostgreSQL codebase.  That is a
> > very tricky process and usually goes badly unless the company seeks
> > community involvement from the start, including user interface,
> > implementation, and coding standards.
> 
> I concur with this. We ran into this with plPerl.

The only way to successfully extend PostgreSQL commercially is to
coordinate with the community.

	-- Andy