Re: Red Hat to support PostgreSQL

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> > On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > > Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
> > > > placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?
> > >
> > > They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
> > > announce something here today.
> >
> > Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
> > current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
> > own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
> > forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
> > said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
> > volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?
>
> Well, I don't know Red Hat has done forking in any other open source
> project, so I don't see why it would happen here.
>

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my "fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the DB arena. Hopefully, even if things don't turn out exactly as expected, they will have benefited Pg a lot by then.

> That is exactly it. No one could keep up with us in a forked branch of
> our code, and if they could, we would not be doing our jobs and maybe
> the fork would be a good thing.

I fear not the technical part...I fear the marketing part. This is were battles are won today (sad but true).

> In fact, we have advanced so quickly in comparison to other open-source
> databases _because_ we are so healthy. If we ever get closed-minded,
> insulting, non-inclusive, or rude, you guys better kick us in the butts.

Hopefully I won't have to look for my spiked shoes anytime soon >-)

Just to lighten up here, I read the following in an article:

'Three months ago, IBM rented a billboard near Oracle's Silicon Valley headquarters declaring a "search for intelligent software," only to find, a few days later, that an Oracle billboard reporting "Then you've come to the right place. Oracle," had been put up.'

cheers,
thalis

>
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