Citus Data Donates 1% of Equity to PostgreSQL Organizations
citusdata.com
citusdata.com
Also, I believe his version of SQL was called QUEL, and we would have been using that term today had Ingres won out.
being a little bit hard on yourself there
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/RDBMS_ti...
I use Python to orchestrate and read SQL scripts from disk which I then write my dynamic variables into, and then pump that into Postgres with psycopg2, and the whole thing's been running perfectly for a couple of years now. Probably a hacky way to do things but it's all offline so I have the luxury of not worrying about security.
Equity, however, creates a conflict of interest. If the non-profit Postgres organizations make money when Citus makes money, then they have an incentive to favor Citus over other companies.
Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally? Or if there's a technical decision to be made, and it involves making one company's code incompatible with base Postgres, who do you think will win?
It's a free market, and the parties involved are perfectly free to make this arrangement, but it generates potential problems.
> Equity, however, creates a conflict of interest. If the non-profit Postgres organizations make money when Citus makes money, then they have an incentive to favor Citus over other companies. > Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally? Or if there's a technical decision to be made, and it involves making one company's code incompatible with base Postgres, who do you think will win?
Note that none of the non-profits have technical decision making power. That's in the end the decision of the committers (and potentially the core team if there's irreconcilable conflicts). Both groups work for a variety of companies.
Well, maybe the competing company could also become a major donor.
By donating actual manpower, efforts that were already there aren't impacted.
[1] https://www.kahnlitwin.com/blogs/tax-blog/is-it-better-to-do...
It's all about managing future expectations. Equity implies future profits being predicated on the success of the stock. And so current actions are influenced by future expectations.
A wheelbarrow of Free Cash Today does not imply anything about future expectations, unless you may be expecting another wheelbarrow in the future.
Still, it's common in practice for people to feel like they are indebted to their donors. But should you feel like you owe someone for them giving you something for free? Well, if so, then it wasn't free.
I think 1% percent donations like this is fantastic. In this it also seems to make business sense for Citus to ensure postgres is well funded :)
Still a good example to follow.
From that point on, we never had to touch the core again.
The Postgresql community is awesome.
On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Julian Assange wrote:
> Does anyone know what is happening with the delegation of the
> postgres domains? Indirect.com was going to hand them over,
> but as yet has not.
Although, to me it seems more like a gesture than anything else - I am curious.
"Building a Movement of Corporate Philanthropy
We want to change the world through inspiring early–stage corporate philanthropy. Pledge 1% is an easy way to leverage a portion of your future success to support nonprofits in your community. It’s a small commitment today that can make a huge impact tomorrow. The sooner you start, the easier it is–so join your fellow founders by making a pledge today!" [1]
In the list are companies like Atlassian, Salesforce, and Yelp.
The pledge is either 1% of equity, time, product, or profit.
Either way, it is more than that due to PostgreSQL's software license. Because of that, we all (potentially) benefit.
And it is a commitment. A (somewhat) stable source. More so if more companies commit to such a pledge.
This seems right in line with their core values. At least how the company values are practiced since I have no idea if they have "core values" or how they are worded.
Well done!
Also their slack page is decently active and helpful
Brewster at Archive.org has been making some persuasive points in public, recently, about non-profit org models, FOSS and sustainable finance models.
One possible scenario to think about is if this 1% equity now tilt any sort of balance in the postgresql organization regarding decision making? I.e. if a decision adversely affects Citus but is better for the community.
A single donation (even if it's big) is not going to shift the balance in a significant manner.