Re: [HACKERS] My new job

* Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> [001010 10:03] wrote:

> > From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> > : One thing we have agreed to is that there must not be an unseemly fraction
> > : of core members working for the same company. With six people on core,
> > : probably about two working at the same company would be a reasonable
> > : limit.
>
> I knew someone was going to bring that up ;-).
>
> There's already been discussion of this point among core. What we
> now have is three core members employed by Great Bridge and the
> other three either fully or partly employed by PostgreSQL Inc.
> In one sense that's a stable situation, but on the other hand it does
> not agree with our original informal goal of keeping any one company
> to a minority position of the core membership.
>
> None of the core members are interested in giving up their new
> positions. En masse resignation from the core committee would preserve
> our high moral standards, perhaps, but it wouldn't do the project any
> good that I can see. So it seems like the choices are to accept the
> status quo, or to appoint some more core committee members to bring
> the numbers back where we said they should be.
>
> While I can think of a number of well-qualified candidates for core
> membership, I don't much like the notion of appointing core members
> just to meet some kind of numerical quota. Also, suppose we do appoint
> more members, and then some of them accept positions with GB or PgSQL
> Inc; do we repeat the exercise indefinitely? (This is not an unlikely
> scenario, since the sort of people who'd be asked to join core are
> exactly the sort of people whom both companies would love to hire.)
>
> Bottom line is we're not sure what to do now. Opinions from the
> floor, anyone?

I think anyone with doubts should take a good look at the initial
companies backing Linux, (Redhat, VA, Debian) to see what a boon
this can be to project.

It is open source, so if you guys do happen to piss us off too much
we can always fork off our own version no? :)

So instead of panicing, it makes much more sense to ride it out and
get a feel for where things are going, there's never going to be
anything terribly binding that will come out of this because it is
an opensource project.

It's much more important to continue on with the rapid pace of
developement than to fear black helicopters that haven't even
shown up as blips on the radar.

--
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright(at)wintelcom(dot)net|alfred(at)freebsd(dot)org]
"I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."