LWN: Comments on "A Turing award for Michael Stonebraker"

A Turing award for Michael Stonebraker

intgr — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:23:04 +0000

Stonebraker makes money by developing "open software" at universities and then turning them into proprietary products. Ingres was developed at Berkeley and then commercialized by Actian Corporation. Postgres was developed at Berkeley and then sold as Illustra. H-Store was developed jointly by a few universities and then sold as VoltDB.

It seems to me that he deliberately avoids any hint of involvement in open source software or PostgreSQL. The Turing award press release didn't even mention PostgreSQL, but did mention Greenplum, one of its proprietary forks. The most direct reference that Stonebraker has made to PostgreSQL, that I know of, is belittling relational databases as "the elephants" in VoltDB marketing documents. (http://downloads.voltdb.com/datasheets_collateral/vdb_web...)

Now, none of this takes away from his achievement of being involved in so many influential database projects. But make no mistake, he is definitely not a proponent of open source software. The fact that independent volunteers picked up the original POSTGRES code dump and turned it into a successful open source project, was incidential.

A Turing award for Michael Stonebraker

nye — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:20:10 +0000

>Hrm, "open software"?

Seems accurate enough to me: Ingres wasn't released as Open Source or Free Software, because neither term had been coined at that time. Using a generic umbrella term 'open software' to describe Ingres and Postgres seems entirely reasonable for those who aren't particularly in it for the politics.

A Turing award for Michael Stonebraker

misterbonnie — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 14:46:47 +0000

Hrm, "open software"?

A Turing award for Michael Stonebraker

reedstrm — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 19:11:57 +0000

Hear hear! I've always loved the core ideas behind postgresql, and the open source community that has grown up around it is fantastic. Stonebraker probably shouldn't get much credit for the later, beyond having the foresight to freely license the code base.