Re: Companies Contributing to Open Source

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 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.

Yes, that does seem painful. I would hope than any vibrant open source
community would have other companies who would have new jobs for many of
these individuals, but I also hope some could continue as volunteers if
they don't get sponsored jobs.

I know when Great Bridge closed, most of the community people had new
jobs almost immediately.

--
Bruce Momjian bruce(at)momjian(dot)us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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