Re: Last gasp - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 03:34:31PM +0100, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> Something that I would suggest is that those that are receiving
> funding be transparent about it. It isn't essential of course, but to
> do any less might lead to the perception of there being a conflict of
> interests in some people's minds, which is best avoided.
> 
> I am conscious of the fact that I've expressed lots of opinions on
> this thread on our processes and so on, some of which, if followed
> through on, would be quite large departures. I hope that they were
> received as modest suggestions.

I appreciate everything everyone said in this thread, and I can't think
of an example off the top of my head where vendors adversely affected
our process.  I think the _big_ reason for that is that our community
members have always acted with a "community first" attitude that has
insulated us from many of the pressures vendors can place on the
development process.  I am sure that protection will continue --- I just
wanted to point out that it is a necessary protection so we can all be
proud of our released code and feature set, and continue working as a
well-coordinated team.

The specific suggestion that vendors are not taking contributors
seriously unless they have commit-bits is perhaps something that
requires education of vendors, or perhaps my blogging about this will
help.  Greg Smith's analysis really hit home with me:

> a non trivial number of business people who assume "!committer ==
> ![trusted|competent]".  That makes having such a limited number of
> people who can commit both a PR issue ("this project must not be
> very important if there are only 19 committers") and one limiting
> sponsorship ("I'm not going to pay someone to work on this feature
> who's been working on it for years but isn't even a committer").

I think the big take-away, education-wise, is that for our project,
committer == grunt work.  Remember, I used to be the big committer of
non-committer patches --- need I say more.  ;-)  LOL

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +