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
---(end of broadcast)---
TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
