Re: Has anyone seen this marketing gimmick? EnterpriseDB vs MySQL vs MariaDB

Stephen Frost <[email protected]> Tue, 26 Sep 2017 07:50:33 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.db.postgresql.advocacy
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Greetings,

* Tsunakawa, Takayuki ([email protected]) wrote:
> From: [email protected]
> > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Frost
> > I agree that it would have been good for them to include all of the major
> > players when it comes to PG and not just focus on one.  The unfortunate
> > reality is that in many other projects there's "the one" big company behind
> > the open source project and few realize that PG has such a great and diverse
> > multi-company ecosystem, even though many of us make a point to bring it
> > up whenever we get the chance.
> 
> I sometimes want a list of organization names that develop PostgreSQL when I'm asked "How many companies and developers are developing 		PostgreSQL?"  This question is sometimes made to compare with MySQL on how the community is thriving.

This would be a good question to have a better answer for, formally,
certainly.  I've looked at trying to formalize this is some way and even
made some progress towards actually having a method which can calculate
the answer to this question based on public information (emails to the
mailing lists, commitfest information, et al).  Perhaps I'll be able to
get back to that here soon, which will be necessary anyway.

It occurs to me that there isn't any particular reason why we couldn't
have the "Contributor profile" information able to be filled out by
anyone, which would allow all .Org users to identify the company they're
with, if they choose to, and why we don't try to link those back to the
Organizations that are also maintained in the website database.  I'll
make a note to try and bring that up on -www for discussion.

> > What might be interesting to discuss here is what more we can be doing to
> > make it clear that the PostgreSQL project is independent of any single
> > company and instead has contributions from many, not unlike the Linux
> > Foundation or the Python Foundation.
> 
> As a user, what reminds me of a single company is the Windows distribution.  The PG package for Windows is provided by EDB, which I think may give an impression that PostgreSQL is a single-vendor open source project.  Please don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to EDB for providing an easy-to-use package.

As mentioned, there's multiple providers of Windows packages linked from
the .Org website, but I tend to agree that we aren't really doing a
great job making it clear that there's multiple providers.  That said,
my preference would actually be for .Org to have a canonical
distribution for all of the platforms that we list off of .Org.

The difficulty there is that we wouldn't do our users any service,
really, by removing the links, and as long as the links exist it's
unlikely that we're going to see anyone volunteer to put in the effort
to build them independently.  Not to mention that the ship has already
more-or-less sailed when it comes to providing links from .Org to these
non-.Org distributions and those companies wouldn't be terribly pleased
to see us remove their links either.  When those companies are also
providing serious material efforts towards moving the project forward by
employing key developers on the project and developing features, well,
it just doesn't make sense to go upsetting the apple cart there.

Of course, if anyone has good suggestions for how to effect changes here
that'll both keep the companies happy, particularly those who are
contributing a great deal to the project, and make it clearer that PG is
a multi-company effort, this is a good place to discuss those ideas, but
raising the concern without having suggestions for changes to make isn't
really moving things forward.  Hopefully the above discussion helps to
outline some of the challenges in this area and helps to spur discussion
of concrete ideas which address those challenges while also moving us
forward.

Thanks!

Stephen
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