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.
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.
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.
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.
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.