The ongoing MySQL campaign

Posted Jan 1, 2010 10:43 UTC (Fri) by markusw (guest, #53024)
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

It seems Michael doesn't know a whole lot about the history of Postgres.

A company founded about ten years ago, called Great Bridge LLC "targeted" several Postgres developers (i.e. paid them to work on Postgres). Late 2001 that company went out of business again. However, it almost didn't affect the Postgres community.

For more information, read these interviews with Bruce Momjian:
http://lwn.net/2001/features/oreilly2001/BruceMomjianInte...
http://www.open-mag.com/features/Vol_12/great_bridge/grea...

So, no, Postgres has already proven to cope pretty well with company buy-outs. Something MySQL still has to prove. And it looks like it's time for that now. I'm curiously watching from the safe distance.

Happy new year to all open source developers.

Markus Wanner

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The ongoing MySQL campaign

Posted Jan 1, 2010 21:49 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

actually, the greatbrige failure did hurt postgres severely. The core developers make no secret about that.

but as a result of that the core postgres developers make it a point to not concentrate in one company so that no matter what happens to any company the other developers are not affected.

so to significantly affect postgres a company would have to buy and shutdown postgres development at many different companies, and do this fast enough that the individual developers could not get jobs with other companies just as fast.

it's far easier for a company who depends heavily on postgres to hire one developer and let that person work on postgres much of the time then it is for a company to hire a team of people (in fact, if you compare the cost of hiring one postgres developer to the cost of licensing Oracle, many companies will find it much cheaper to hire the developer)

Since many of the companies who use Postgres extensively are very large companies (especially in the far east), it is not reasonable to consider all such companies (or even a significant fraction of them) being bought by _any_ one company (not even microsoft or IBM)

So the postgres team has anticipated this problem and implemented policies to eliminate the risk.

Greatbridge closure had little affect on PostgreSQL

Posted Jan 2, 2010 1:27 UTC (Sat) by bmomjian (guest, #44864) [Link] (1 responses)

Uh, when did the core developers state that the failure of Greatbridge hurt the project? I certainly have never heard that and don't feel that way. All the core folks had new jobs soon after Greatbridge closed. It was nice to have Greatbridge marketing behind our effort, but that is a marketing effect, not a software engineering effect.

Greatbridge closure had little affect on PostgreSQL

Posted Jan 2, 2010 1:33 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I have heard it a couple of different times from core developers at different conferences. Greatbridge was wonderful while it lasted, but it's failure and the need for so many of the core developers to find new jobs at once was a real problem.

according to at the different core developers I have heard talk about it, this is why the core developers all work for different companies, it's not accidental, it's a deliberate effort to spread the employment around to protect the projects from problems with any one company