PostgreSQL community impact of 2nd Quadrant purchase
momjian.us
momjian.us
Keep that in mind when you note that he says:
> the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60%
This works out to 3 out of 5 people including Bruce himself.
When it comes to development, it might be better to look at committers, i.e. people with the right to commit stuff, recognized contributors, or even people who submitted patch to a recent commitfest:
* https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers
* https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
* https://commitfest.postgresql.org/29/
And those groups are much larger and more diverse (in terms of employers). Plus if you look the the stats published by Robert Haas, some of the most active developers are working for other companies.
Edit: That being said, I'd love to see people from other companies participating in the community, and I'm generally trying to help new contributors with their patches.
Unfortunately, most of the likely candidates with money to throw around have their own pet database systems, and don't have in interest in Postgres.
Maybe one of the mid-sized cloud providers like Digital Ocean would be interested?
Obviously, if more companies start supporting the community, that'd be even better.
That would be weird, since Amazon has no major contributors. NTT, Microsoft, Fujitsu, or another seat for Crunchy Data (among other possibilities) would seem to be more natural choices than giving a seat to Amazon, looking at major contributors.
Go on any major project and see the contributors and the distribution of commits between the top 5-10 vs everyone else and it's almost always startling.
They're a decision making group (eg project direction), and the size doesn't reflect the number of active developers on the project in any way.
eg there are a lot more active developers than there are "core team"
They could style as The Choir of the Aztounding Relational Pachyderm for all it ought to matter.
Notwithstanding which, it's pretty conventional for the role of FOSS project core teams to be administrative-deliberative stewardship and an umbrella authority for all project activities. The overlap with membership of the developer community and concern for technical outcomes is a function of the domain, not the team purpose. The governance consequence at hand being that representational proportions matter to preserve independence and the appearance thereof.
There is no assertable "fact" that diversity of expression, or the expression of preferences and identity, extends from immaturity or ideology. On the contrary, it is a mark of organisational and civilisational maturity, and willingness to embrace ideas, that such self-expression is possible, accepted, and encouraged. The qualifiers I'd suggest instead are heterogeneity and imagination, and there is no trend to buck; the world is, and always has been, full of complicated, imaginative people.
When I am very lucky, I even get to work with them.
Sans identity, the individual is a puppet, and sans creativity, humanity is cosmically uninteresting.
If your only goal is to communicate what a progressive, free thinking, modern ideologue you are, then sure, give your groups whatever names you like if that's the sort of people you want to dog whistle to. If, like most other people, you simply want to communicate the groups purpose in a quick way, then there are plenty of de facto standards to follow.
Fortunately, most people choosing whimsical names for things actually do so playfully and creatively. The idea that out there some grumpy clown with a stick up their ass about "ease of communication" is going to launch into a diatribe about "dog whistles" and "ideology", doesn't enter into that process.
Rather serendipitously my next library extraction is postgresql-related. I was pondering an appropriate name. In the circumstance I think I shall name it Chorale of the Aztounding Relational Pachyderm, and if anyone asks I will point them in your direction for an explanation.
If you change that slightly to "Chorale of the Relational Aztounding Pachyderm", it might hinder adoption. Or maybe not. ;)
I think if you look closely you'll see GP didn't say they should be called that, just that it would be more accurate to call them that, presumably with respect to communicating their responsibilities to others.
Whatever you choose, it's not my business to judge.
The equivalent, in all my own countries of citizenship, origin, or residence, might be that deceiving someone into thinking you are a police officer is already illegal, although simple impersonation may not be e.g. for satirical purposes. Satire aside, in a country that generally trusts its law enforcement personnel, such a deception, particularly in person, may have both high capacity for harm and a high likelihood it occurs for harm's sake. Nevertheless, notwithstanding my total unfamiliarity with the case you refer to, I struggle to see how Twitter is ever anything other than satire. My own Twitter profile reflects this view.
Curiously, in Australia, it is illegal to claim an association with Sir Donald Bradman, and for similar reasons of potential harm. Impersonating a Prime Minister is not, since it is a very low occupation and any attempt to do so is self-evidently preposterous.
I suppose that a mindset capable of reducing human agency to the status of loop variables, explains some of the frankly tyrannical opinions being expressed in response to my remark.
If 3 people prefer the bike shed to be "pale blue" and the other 3 prefer it to be "cornflower blue", does that make the color a "divisive issue"?
Ultimately, even for an issue where people have very strong feelings on both sides, it's far more important that forward progress be made. At some point, standing around arguing is only going to be counterproductive.
I gave a talk on a particularly divisive decision we had to make a few years ago:
Anyway, my question was meant to challenge the assumption that "it's far more important that forward progress be made". If you're trying to run a business, it's hard to argue with of course.
So just to be clear, what I certainly don't mean is that action should always be taken quickly without a proper consideration. Having a discussion is obviously important for understanding all the potential pros and cons of the various decisions. Additionally, it's really important that everyone feel like their voice is heard and their needs and preferences considered.
I'm talking about once all that's done. Sometimes you have a discussion, everyone basically understands what the other people want and where they're coming from, you're pretty sure all the relevant factors have been considered, and half of the people still prefer A, and the other half prefer B. At that point, further discussion is often counterproductive.
In the event of the tie, the tie-breaker vote owner resolves it and passes the to token to the next person.
In this manner, the decision bias is averaged out between all of the board members.
The first is the different between core team and committers. The core team is much more like a steering committee than anything else. The core team is responsible for various policy issues, coordinating broader release activities, and handling disciplinary issues.
In contrast, committers are the ones that determine what code goes in and does not. The list of committers is about 30 people. And there are many people that work to contribute large pieces of code but not responsible for the final leg of committing.
Edit: I've written a bit more before on all of the non-code bits of Postgres - http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/10/31/postgres-the-non-co...
Congrats on the job change to https://www.crunchydata.com/ btw! Hope you're able to continue your community-benefiting work there.
I've been in and around the community for quite some years. The acquisition hopefully was a good outcome for 2ndQuadrant and EDB. But I don't personally see it changing the landscape of providers. There are a lot of companies that offer support, consulting, and services for Postgres. 2ndQuadrant has long been one place I would refer people to in Europe, but less so in the US. While some friends do work in the US for them most of their engineering happens in EU. There is a lot of options in Europe still, from Dalibo to Cybertec to Postgres Professional. In the US you've had Crunchy Data, PGExperts, and EDB for some time (all of them in existence for longer than 5 years now). That has not changed, maybe we need more than this... but it isn't something to the scale of many other monopolies.
The percentage of concentration on core is an issue and my outside of core understanding is that such is being addressed.
For non-competes, perhaps this is a bigger issue than I realize. But being based in California I'm surprised to see this. Having worked at one place running and managing Postgres (Heroku) to then go to another to run and manage Postgres (Citus Data) to joining Microsoft to run and manage Postgres, I'm now doing similar at Crunchy Data building and running our multi-cloud Postgres service - https://www.crunchybridge.com. Perhaps non-competes are a big issue for some east coast or for European countries, but at least where I sit I'm surprised by that argument.
Someone did post the announcement, but it didn't get any attention.
Percona created their own mysql distribution [2] with a number of improvements, which was quite helpful while awaiting (very long) release cycles from Oracle, for MySQL community.
1 - https://www.percona.com/software/postgresql-distribution
1) Neither company owns any part of the PostgreSQL code / docs. We do have various proprietary tools, of course, but so do other companies.
2) The companies employ quite a few PostgreSQL hackers, but if you look at the development stats (e.g. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgre...) you'll see there are many committers and developers in other companies.
That being said, I agree with the concerns expressed by Bruce in his blog post. Or more precisely - I do understand why people in the community have those concerns, but I believe (hope) it's not going to harm the community.
Given how PostgreSQL has been growing, what is stopping more startups to build around this? The reason I ask is this is HN, which is part of YC - so many of us are (possible) founders. This looks like a growing B2B/Enterprise opportunity, or am I wrong?
That being said, there are various other companies providing this type of services around the world, although most of them are more local (but hey, anyone can be global with a zoom meeting now).
There are also quite a few other companies doing other stuff, employing great PostgreSQL hackers and contributing to the community.
I am seeing a trend toward sustainable businesses nowadays. I am happy starting up a sustainable business, no matter what you might call it.
So, no, the term "startup" wasn't co-opted but has meant a fast growing silicon valley type company for the last 50 years. Before that it was not used to refer to new businesses.
As a note, "starting up" is not the same as "startup."
The only people who call a business idea "bad" solely because it doesn't enable "hockey stick growth and massive revenue per employee numbers" are people who's business world view is so constricted that the only possible "good" business is a SV ideal, VC funded, growth at all cost model. That isn't the only way to do it.
A small consulting business is not a startup, it's a small business that already has a perfectly fine business model. As soon as the founder picks up the phone and makes a few calls it's out of the "startup" search phase and is now started as a real business.
Companies that actually make profits but will never go public for a billion dollars are derided as "lifestyle" businesses.
Some people want to co-opt it to refer to lifestyle businesses and small businesses and whatever else because it gives them better marketing. Most people find that silly.
Sad thing is, I have no problems believing you actually believe that.
Your head is going to explode when you find out how we've co-opted the word "computer".
- https://www.crunchybridge.com
The Postgres consulting/support services landscape may be consolidating some, but I'm not even sure that is a broader trend. Meanwhile there are more tools and services popping up regularly.
Support doesn’t scale, and startups (of the VC sponsored kind) need to.
I use PG. I like PG. I like how the PG core self-police.
... then the PG Community would very likely fork to a new group of people and continue on growing just fine.
See OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Hudson -> Jenkins, (etc)
MySQL’s licensing model gave MySQL AB (and thus it's purchasers) a privileged role that no one has with regard to Postgres.
And even there, MariaDB is a thing...
What solutions are they looking at?
Not SaaS startups, but services-first products-second consultants who know postgres inside out and can solve hard problems that development teams don't have the time or expertise to.
Sounds like a fun way to go for many needs seeking independence and continued human interaction (as opposed to one-person-saas).
Would there be more features coming to Open Source Postgre, or is Postgre now a Postgre Core where Enterprise features get moved to EDB?