Re: [HACKERS] Increased company involvement

On K, 2005-04-27 at 22:21 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > However, there was a lot of coordination that happened with Fujitsu that
> > I don't see happening with the current companies involved. Companies
> > are already duplicating work that is also done by community members or
> > by other companies.
>
> That is why we have 80 Linux distributions and a dozen FreeBSD
> distributions (can I include MacOSX?).

I guess more aprropriate comparison would be to distibution specific
linux kernels, i.e. RedHat linux kernel vs. suse linux kernel v.s.
"vanilla" or "real" :) linux kernel.

> > The big issue is communication. Because the
> > PostgreSQL code base is common for most of the companies involved, there
> > has to be coordination in what they are working on and their approaches.
>
> I can see this as an issue but sometimes that community is a hampering
> course as well. I recognize the community goals and respect them but in
> some things the community can move really slow. From what I can tell
> some of this is caused by the no new features rules etc...
>
> In business moving slow can mean death to a project.
>
> Which is why (hate to beat a dead horse) many OSS projects have moved
> to 6 month release cycles.

Well, it is a two-sided thing. On one hand, businesses usually need new
features "yesterday", but on the other hand, business would loose most
of the benefit of getting the feature fast, if it is not included in the
main branch along the road, preferrably in the next official release,
because said business would be dependent of the implementor of his
specific feature for integrating _all_ other new and desirable fetures
of next releas in their specific version of postgres.

> > is happening. I realize this is hard for companies because their
> > efforts are in some ways part of their profitability.
>
> That is true, there are sometimes strategic reasons to not annouce a
> project.

I can see no strategic advantages for sponsors in not announcing the
project. There may be some small tactical wins for the actual
implementors, but not even tactical wins the sponsors.

There may be some strategic/tactical reasons for sponsors to announce
who they (the sponsors) are, but I can't see any reason not to announce
the project or not to encourage/ask/demand the implementor to do so.

> > profitability require duplication of effort and code collisions? I am
> > not sure, but if it does, we are in trouble. I am not sure the
> > community has the resources to resolve that many collisions.
>
> Which is why you are starting to see forks such as Bizgres but it is
> also why you are seeing forks go away (Mammoth PostgreSQL).

At first glance at least, BizGres looks like a community oriented
project and I hope that BizGres will be a testbed/early implementation
of some DataWarehouse features, which will be integrated back to
postgres at first possibility.

But I too expected the discussion to take place on pgsql-hackers, not
some half-hidden mailinglist on pgfoundry. Or at least an announcement
of that mailinglist to be made on pgsql-hachers.

OTOH, there are some things (2PC, recursive queries, ...) which are
discussed on psql-hacker and still are lingering somewhere and are for
various reasons (one of them may be lack of time/money/sponsor-pressure
for the developer) not in the postgres proper yet.

OTOOH, I see that a growing number of companies who might think of
sponsoring PG development are interested in BI/DW and OLAP features in
addition to plain OLTP enchancements.

--
Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)skype(dot)net>