"He finally concluded with some requests to the postgres developer community"
... You're one of the most well funded companies in the world, you shouldn't be asking for features to open aource devs, but you should be opening PRs
... You're one of the most well funded companies in the world, you shouldn't be asking for features to open aource devs, but you should be opening PRs
Railroading an open source project with money or dev time in order to force it to go in the direction you want is not the right way. Those things should be available if the community asks, but they shouldn't be the opening offer.
Engaging the community and intelligently advocating for improvements is a way to contribute to projects as well, especially if you're willing to use a disposable forks to explore the design space, put forth RFCs, PRs, etc.
I thought they were swimming in enough money to hire someone to do the rebasing. Or dogfood their models to do the same.
Blindly opening "PRs" (Postgres doesn't work in this way, it's diffs on a mailing list) would not get you anywhere very fast. You need buy in and consensus from the wider development team.
You don't do that by throwing PR's over the wall and then moving on. You do that by being part of the community.
That said sometimes you just don't have the resources to engage another community at the moment, so you push the PR over the wall anyway, assume it won't ever land and act accordingly.
The smaller and less impactful the change, the bigger chance of it landing. I'm always clear with my PR's that I push over the wall though: I probably won't be around to maintain this, feel free to not merge, etc. I also try to thank them for their service to the community and share how their code made my life easier.
PG is really difficult to contribute to because it's such a fast moving target. You get your patches into one commitfest and then you don't get them accepted in time, now you're into the next commitfest, and now you have to rebase across 1,000 commits, lather, rinse, repeat.
Contributing to PG is nearly a full-time job!
I bet it's much easier to find an existing committer to PG and pay them as consultants to do the work you need.
And as siblings point out, you have to figure out what the upstream might be willing to accept, and they might have to tell you that. This requires a conversation. Presenting to them is a way to start that conversation.
Money doesn't mean "I built whatever I want and Postgres will evolve into whatever I want by pushing my code". They still need to align and plan. Sure, they'll build the things and contribute, but they don't own it and still need to accomodate the wishes of the project