Re: Red Hat to support PostgreSQL

> On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
> > > placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?
> >
> > They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
> > announce something here today.
>
> Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
> current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
> own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
> forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
> said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
> volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

Well, I don't know Red Hat has done forking in any other open source
project, so I don't see why it would happen here.

Yes, technically, they can fork it, but so can anyone else. The BSD
license concept is that a company could not possibly duplicate the
effectiveness of the open source community, so why would any company
try.

> It would really spoil my day to have GM'ed Postgresqls running
> around. I can barely keep up with one, let alone two ;-)

That is exactly it. No one could keep up with us in a forked branch of
our code, and if they could, we would not be doing our jobs and maybe
the fork would be a good thing.

The biggest fork I can remember was from Jolitz's 386/BSD project.
Jolitz was clearly keeping it all to himself and not doing anything to
advance the code. The NetBSD fork was clearly a good thing.

I am not saying anything about PostgreSQL forking. What I am saying is
that as long as we are healthy, no one can fork effectively, and this is
true of all open-source projects.

In fact, we have advanced so quickly in comparison to other open-source
databases _because_ we are so healthy. If we ever get closed-minded,
insulting, non-inclusive, or rude, you guys better kick us in the butts.

--
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