Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Global Development Group

At 12:12 AM 5/12/2002 -0500, Robert Treat wrote:
> >
> > What are the consequences of the problem?
> >
>
>One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it
>extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql.
...
>You can't win marketshare on technology alone

I am happy with increasing market share so long a development is not
distorted or current users inconvenienced. We have seen the latter with the
misplaced announcements. And the former because I am writing this on
-hackers, rather than implementing dependency-tracking in pg_dump ;-).

>...lots of stuff deleted...
>Marketing is very relevant to existing customers.

Good point. Market Share -> Influence ->Corprate Support -> more features
-> market share.

Gaining market share *is* a natural consequence of improving the product;
marketing is about convincing people a product has improved, even if it
hasn't. Advocacy is about telling people about the product as it is - and I
have no problem with that, with the above proviso.

>Aren't most development efforts made simply to gain market share?

<diatribe>
I seriously hope not - in fact I would find that very depressing.

In my opinion, anyone who devotes their personal free time to an open
source development project probably has a slew of complex motivations that
have little to do with market share. Perhaps the closest they would come
would be to say "I want to make it better", and in some peoples minds,
"better" is measured by market share.

In my case, development I did on other open source projects (libgd) was
driven by a philosophical objection to application of patents to software
in the US, and to a need for particular features (gd2 format, & gif
support). My work on PG is driven by a desire to make the product more
useful (to me), more usable (for me), and by a philosophical belief in the
importance of free & open software. The fact that other people (& I) profit
from this work is great. In any case, market share, for me, is at best a
third order influence - and I assume that's true for most people who
contribute to OS software. Although I do admit that there is a natural
tendency to want "your team" to win.
</diatribe>

>After
>all, I don't think we added schema support to get *less* people to use
>postgresql.

I am not sure why it was added, and it's sufficiently esoteric and large
that I doubt market share was an issue. If we wanted market share, then
online-vacuum and online-upgrade would have been the big-hitters.

My guess is that it was done because we did not support it, it is in the
SQL standard, and it solved a number of issues that caused existing users &
developers problems. It was probably also an interesting project. Maybe I'm
wrong...

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