Development quotes of the week

Digital Ocean, the cloud services company, runs a marketing campaign every October where they give out T-shirts to people who have opened a certain small number of pull requests on GitHub for any open source projects. It seems that in previous years this has been fairly successful: many projects have gotten at least somewhat useful contributions, and some even new long-term contributors, and DO has gotten people to wear their marketing material.

This year, a lot of people are opening entirely useless PRs, some just adding space characters, in order to get the T-shirts. This has upset some of the open source project maintainers, who feel their time is being wasted: it takes time to reject a PR. I'm inclined to agree with them.

The tendency to involve other people's computers in doing jobs that you could do on your own computer is a fundamental wrong turning in computing practice.

Last week 2nd Quadrant was purchased by edb. While this is certainly good news for these companies, it can increase risks to the Postgres community. First, there is an unwritten rule that the Postgres core team should not have over half of its members from a single company, and the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60% — the core team is working on a solution for this.