None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
EDIT: typos
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos...
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai...
Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.
There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution.
That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project.
Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.
Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
The solution is to ask Company B to pay up (in cash or resources), and not be leeching.
Then don't make an open source product.
What you can't do is try to earn the goodwill that comes with open source, but also expect the profitability of a proprietary product.
If you want to sell software then sell software.
That’s why this action by Matt is ridiculous. WP Engine has grown the overall WP market through good product development and investment. That has produced positive effects for the many companies and people who make their money developing and supporting WP sites for clients.
We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on.
This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
There’s a pretty standard way of fighting those out.
I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
I help out with Godot sometimes and it’s far more welcoming and low friction.
Could be because of that missing part of "sharing together" replaced with "taking and not giving back anything in return"