Re: Companies Contributing to Open Source

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 22:04 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> >> I remember the president of Great Bridge
> >> saying that the company needs the community, but not visa-vera --- if
> >> the company dies, the community keeps going (as it did after Great
> >> Bridge, without a hickup), but if the community dies, the company dies
> >> too.
>
> > I 95% agree here. If EDB or CMD were go to down in flames, it could hurt
> > the community quite a bit.
>
> Josh, I hate to burst your bubble, but Great Bridge employed a much
> larger fraction of the hacker-community-at-the-time than either EDB or
> CMD do today. We survived that, and if EDB or CMD or Greenplum or the
> entire lot went down tomorrow, we'd survive that too.

I never once suggested that the community would not survive. I said it
would hurt productivity for "n" amount of time.

Let's just be realistic here:

In one fails swoop:

Devrim, Alvaro, Darcy, Heikki, Bruce, Simon, Greg, Dave, Marc and I are
all suddenly looking for employment...

You don't think there would be an issue that could cause some grief to
the community? Is it surmountable? Of course, that isn't the point. The
point is that it is not painless.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

>
> regards, tom lane
>
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