Re: Confusion over Python drivers {license}

Kevin Ar18 wrote:
>
> Based on that, I guess my question is what would it have taken to have
> picked one of BSD/MIT projects and working with those people instead?  In
> other words, what key things affected the decision for psycopg?  What
> areas is it so far ahead in or that would have just been too much work to
> fix in the other implementations?

A lot of it as I see it is plain old fashioned popularity resulting from
long sustained development.  psycopg has been around since 2001, the
current version is already compatible with SQLAlchemy, Django, Zope, PyDO,
and it's integral to the large Python/PostgreSQL toolchain from Skype
including tools like Londiste.  When something is supported in that many
places, and the main complaints are its license and documentation rather
than its code, I know I'm not going to start by assuming I should just hack
on somebody else's code to try and replace it just because their license is
a little better.  And I'd consider BSD/MIT only a little better than the
LGPL.

That sort of bad decision making is how we got to so many abandoned Python
drivers in the first place.  If everybody who decided they were going to
write their own from scratch had decided to work on carefully and painfully
refactoring and improving PyGreSQL instead, in an incremental way that grew
its existing community along the way, we might have a BSD driver with
enough features and users to be a valid competitor to psycopg2.  But
writing something shiny new from scratch is fun, while worrying about
backward compatibility and implementing all the messy parts you need to
really be complete on a project like this isn't, so instead we have a stack
of not quite right drivers without any broad application support.

(Aside:  I have a bit of vocabulary I regularly use for this now.
Open-source projects that just ignore working on an existing stack of
working implementations, to instead start from scratch to build something
of questionably improved fanciness instead regardless of its impact on
backward compatibility and the existing userbase, have in my terminology
"PulseAudioed" the older projects).

The gauntlet I would throw down for anyone who thinks there's a better
approach here is to demonstrate a driver that has working support going
back to Python 2.4 for any two of the apps on my list above.  Get even that
much of a foothold, and maybe the fact that yours is more Pythonic,
cleaner, or better licensed matters.  Until then, working apps have to be
the primary motivation for what to work on here, unless there's a really
terrible problem with the driver.  The existing psycopg license and the web
site issues were in combination enough to reach that level of total issues
for a number of people.  With the news from Federico that a license
improvement is approaching and signs of major documentation improvements,
that problem seems like it will soon be solved as far as I'm concerned.
When someone manages to make their alternative driver a prerequisite for an
app I need, only at that point will that driver show back up on my radar.

-- 
Greg Smith    2ndQuadrant   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com  www.2ndQuadrant.com


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