Thoughs after discussions at OSCON - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Hi all,

I've been doing some reflecting on some things I saw and heard at the
OSCON this year, and I thought I'd note them here, more to prime
discussion than to propose any strong conclusions.

1.  The first item I think bears mention is the number of occasions I
had people ask me whether the project is losing steam, or "losing
out" to MySQL, or being no threat to Oracle.

Coming from (as I do) the position that MySQL is increasingly
irrelevant to the community's efforts, I found this pretty
surprising.  What it tells me, though, is that this message is
getting through to people, even if we don't think it's a real or
meaningful one.  (My alarm at this is no doubt increased by my
reading a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer right now; but that
example only serves to remind me more than ever that pursuing
rational argument in the face of hysterical opinion is not always an
approach that will yield happy results.)

In a different way, since I'm not particularly interested in
"threatening" Oracle, I'm not sure why people were anxious to set up
that sort of battle.

In any case, this leads me to believe that we need to find some way
to begin to undermine all the FUD out there, before we get into such
deep water that we can't get back to shore.  I don't know how to do
this; but I came away with the impression that this is much more
important than it used to be.  I was surprised, for instance, to see
Oracle in a prominent place near by us on the floor.  I think MySQL
has taken from them just enough money now that they're seeing free
software as a real threat, and given the things I've heard from
Oracle reps I've talked to, I know they think Postgres is a much
bigger deal to them than is MySQL.

2.    The second item that struck me is that, in spite of what I
heard in (1), even more large companies are looking at betting the
farm on Postgres.  I think this is excellent news, but we've
certainly got to find a way both to make this a safe choice for
themselves and others (by getting people "out of the closet"), and to
make it sustainable (by building up a community of administrators who
can run these systems).  I think the latter consideration is
particularly important: if people start adopting this system, and
find it's impossible to find administrators, PostgreSQL will be
written off as impossible to use.  It would be a really bad time for
the DBA mixture to get "lean".

3.    There is a sort of change coming about once again in the free
software world.  It appeared to me that there were a lot more
"enterprise" and pointy-hair types this year than in the two previous
years I've been there.  This might, of course, be a function of the
burgeoning of my own points, but I suspect that it rather marks a
resurgence of commercial interest in free software that sort of had
its wind knocked out by the bursted bubble in 2000 or 2001.  This set
of commercially interested people are much more sceptical than the
last round, which probably means that they'll have better legs; but
also, that they're likely to tell us some things we don't really want
to hear.  We're going to have to be particularly sensitive to those
sorts of marketing concerns in order to deal with (1) and (2).  I
think we can do it for sure, but I was reminded on more than one
occasion of the tendency of some in the free software community (and
not here in particular) to point and scream the moment a profit
motive is floated.  This isn't, by the way, to criticise anyone here.
It was merely an observation generally of the conference, and some of
the hallway conversations I heard (by no means most, let alone all).
Note that this is _not_ a claim that we need to pander to commercial
interests and make salespeople happy.  It's rather to say that I
won't be surprised if we see more folks coming from corporations,
and wanting free things from the community.  We're going to have to
be sure that we understand their issues before accepting or
rejecting their proposals, because very often they'll bring a
perspective we'd never have thought about.



In any case, those are some not-too-random thoughts I had on my
return.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
Information security isn't a technological problem.  It's an economics
problem.
        --Bruce Schneier