> As for the risks inherent in such an actor in the community, well, as
> near as I can tell, the people who try to fork-and-close
> community-derived software quickly find themselves outpaced by the
> community software. So if that _were_ their strategy (and for the
> record, I don't think it is), what good would it do them?
Hi Andrew, it was nice meeting you at OSCON. As you kindly imply, EnterpriseDB is definitely NOT trying to fork and outrun Postgres. We are contributing directly (and immediately) to the community for some stuff (such as Alvaro's work & Coverity & more to come) and we are doing our own set of modular changes (that are not BSD open source on day 1) for things like Oracle compatibility features for things that are already handled the ANSI-ISO way by core PG.
EDB has a large number of developers and we spend a decent portion of our engineering effort keeping up with the continual torrent of great fixes and improvements that comes from the community. The GA version of our product is current up through 8.0.3 and the Alpha version of our next generation product is going to be built on 8.1 as soon as Beta 1 goes out.
--Denis Lussier
Chief Architect & Chairman
http://www.enterprisedb.com