Re: Survey results from the PostgreSQL portal page

Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 01:19:03PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:
>
>>pretty wide feature set (as good as any other open source rdbms afaik)
>>plus it's open source, so if we don't have a feature that say oracle has,
>>you can pay someone the $10,000+ the oracle license will cost to implement
>>it. I've also not seen much FUD on the other issues either. If you can
>
>
> Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way. I knew one government
> organization that decided to go for Oracle for 500K Euro instead of
> adding the missing features (actually almost exclusively PITR). One of
> the top arguments I heard was: "I don't believe that free software
> community works. Once the developers get a social life or even kids,
> they stop working on software." Of course I told him that I still do
> work on free software despite having three sons on which he answered:
> "Maybe, but I still don't believe it."
>
> Sad but true.

Interesting observation, and not entirely irrelevant. It's the strength
of any particular Open Source Community that seems to indicate whether
or not there are going to be enough people getting involved to overcome
the attrition rate of the people becoming less involved.

With PostgreSQL, a lot of work goes into building and feeding the
community. That includes making sure the right people are talking to
each other, assisting people to find the information they need, and
other simpler stuff like making sure the basic facilities work (cvs,
ftp, websites, etc).

We are fortunate in that being based on a BSD license is assisting
businesses to adopt PostgreSQL without needing to think too hard about
licensing ramifications, and we are also fortunate that the quality of
PostgreSQL is extremely good and has an increasingly excellent
reputation that is attracting people from countries all over the world
to get involved.

When people suggest that the "Free Software Community" doesn't work, it
may be worthwhile pointing out that it works very well for the
Communities that are strong, but he could be correct for those that
haven't become self-sufficient yet.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

> Michael

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi