Article on PostgreSQL V8 release

_http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/62/3677.html_
(http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/62/3677.html)

I found these excerpts interesting:

Josh Berkus

I've been involved with a number of open source projects, and as I see it,
there are three humps to get over before you are a “big project.” The number
one is when you go from being one developer to being multiple developers.
Number two is when you pick up momentum among open source users, when people you
never met before start jumping on mailing lists and saying, “Hey, I've used
the software, is there anything can I do to help you out.” That gets you a
certain distance, and then when you grow even further in that direction to
reach the third hump, where rather than just individuals, companies start saying “
Hey, you've got a cool project, we use the software, we want to contribute,
we want to be publicly involved with your project, it's good for our PR, too.”

.....

So, overall, there has been a huge reaction, and one of the things that I am
encouraged by is that the Windows port has resulted in over 100,000
downloads and new users, potentially, people who weren't able to use PostgreSQL
before because they didn't have access to experts on Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris
or other Unix-like operating systems. And that's going to continue to help
grow our community.

....

Openness is not only part of our design, but part of our culture. The idea
being that PostreSQL is there for you to hack. If you need something that most
users don't need, or don't use, but it's special for your project or your
business goal, you can go ahead and hack it. That, combined with the business
license, let's you go ahead and hack it, and then commercialize it. You can
even release under a commercial license. It's there to be completely, 100%
free, and that's the main thing that attracts people to PostgreSQL.

We have been releasing a new version about once per year for the last
several years, and I don't see any reason for that pattern to change. It's a good
compromise between how often the developers would like to release, which is
about once every six months, and how often our users would like us to release,
which is actually more like once very 18 months.