Commercial Support ...

Good morning all...

As was discussed briefly a short while ago, we are slowly work up
into the next level for PostgreSQL ... Commercial Support.

God, what a horrific word, eh? Commercial? Not meant to be,
which is why I'm posting this...

Three years ago (or was it four?), shortly after Jolly and Andrew
graduated from University of California at Berkeley, I rose up and took
over the task of co-ordinating the evolution of what has been come to be
known as PostgreSQL. What started off as a simple project involving
Bruce, Thomas, Vadim and myself evolved into one where the developers span
all the continents (except Australia), and where we have a product that we
are all proud to be apart of.

Several weeks back, "The Core" began talking about going to the
aforementioned "next step"...offering Commercial Support. This, like the
original project, is meant to evolve as we go along, so anything that I
state here is subject to change as situations require it...except for
*one* thing: we are *not* evolving this into a Commercial Product!!
Commercially *Viable*, yes...but, as it has always been, it always will be
Open and Freely available Software.

We have alot of plans as to what we want to do, and where we want
to go with it, but nothing, as of yet, has been set in stone. Our start
date is planned for June 1st of this year...

The reason for this email, at this time, is to get a feel for who
is interested in being apart of this. Plans are to feed revenues back
into the project, as a whole, towards development of features that have
"sat by the wayside" because they aren't particular glamorous, as well as
several other things over time.

The Support side of this will be run under http://www.pgsql.com,
which has a plain "place-holder" in place while we build the real site.

What we are looking for, right now, is a pseudo-resume from those
interested...ppl that have experience with the internals that we can
contract out to, as required, as well as those who consider themselves
proficient at using PostgreSQL from an admin/user standpoint.

What we are looking for, mainly, is such things as:

Areas of proficiency.
Operating Systems Experienced in.
Primary spoken language, as well as any other language.

Information on projects that you are proud of should be included
also...its kinda nice to know *why* you are proficient :)

All and any correspondance should go to support(at)pgsql(dot)com, since
sending it to my personal mailbox has a very good chance of getting it
lost...;) Anyone with a reasonably active mailbox will understand what
I'm saying :)

As June 1st approaches, there will be more specific information
posted about this...

Thanks...

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org