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Comment by data_ders | Hacker News Reader

anytime a huge multi-decades-old FOSS project lands a milestone, I can't help but equate it to something like a moon landing.

So much (unpaid) work and thought goes into stewarding open software. Kudos to the whole team. Software infra is just as important as bridges and roads -- here's hoping we can fund it at least as well, for humanity's sake. [1]

[1]: https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

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PostgreSQL is also one of the most impressive projects out there in terms of being community maintained, as opposed to many large FOSS projects which have some kind of corporate backing employing the majority of the core team.

Isn't the good part of the core team part of EnterpriseDB?

3 of 7 work at EDB, and the core team doesn’t drive the project roadmap. And EDB hackers fail to get patches in all the time, just like everyone else :)

You can see a break-down of the core team and major contributors here, as well as their current company affiliation: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

(and as noted in the other comment, whilst EDB certainly makes important contributions, they are one of many)

TIL Julian Assange was a contributor to PostgreSQL

Isn't the work in large projects often done by those paid by their employers on "company time"? For instance Bruce Momjian by EDB.

Yes, and Andres (literally the “main hat” they wear at Microsoft is work on PostgreSQL, and Tom, etc. I don’t understand why pointing out what should be obvious gets people to lose their mind here and is such a controversy. PostgreSQL like Linux is a massively commercially sponsored project - that there are some volunteers doesn’t change that.

I used to be paid full time to mostly work on a Linux kernel subsystem. This discussion is silly.

Agreed - just think about the billions, possibly trillions of economic value (jobs, shareholder value, utility to society, etc) that a project like postgres or ruby on rails has created.

They significantly increased major versions frequency, transition from 9 to 10 took 7 years, and now they release major version every year.

They just changed the versioning scheme; it used to be that e.g. 9.3 -> 9.4 was a major version (i.e. can't be upgraded in-place). Starting with PG 10 major versions are now 10 -> 11, etc. I don't believe the major release cadence itself changed that much

It seems like they fell more inline with Semantic Versioning when that format came in vogue. Semantic Versioning is what most devs expect now; it makes sense to communicate the version in a format that has a broadly understood meaning for devs.

I think there is no semantic versioning anymore, they just release one major number version every year, regardless how large and backward compatible changes are there.

16 contains paid work

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