Thanks for the feedback. I was a bit worried the post would be too
bland, but I think I'm seeing now where I wanted to go in the first
place, which is to discuss perceptions around conflict of interest.
I sometimes hear stuff like "in order to take over an open source
project you need to hire the committers". Ignoring the insult to the
integrity of the committers, I think this is also based on a wrong idea
of conflict of interest.
One typical perceived conflict of interest is that commercial companies
may use committers to keep commercially relevant features out of the
free community product in order to better facilitate an upsell. One
might have argued that replication in PostgreSQL is a case in point. So
in my blog post I argue that enhancing the core product is actually in
the interest of commercial offerings because "the enemy" is not the free
community edition but rather alternative products like Oracle or MySQL.
And making the free community product stronger beefs up the sales
process, because a corner stone of open source based sales processes is
to get free versions into potential customer companies.
Now, I'm sure I'm a bit naive about this, however, the core argument I
make above seems right to me. It would be interesting see where actual
conflicts of interest happen and the last defense for the community is
actually the integrity of the committers, and not some economic reasoning.
Cheers,
Dirk
Josh Berkus wrote:
> Dirk,
>
>
>> <a href="http://www.enterprisedb.com/">EnterpriseDB</a> is a well-funded
>> database startup whose product builds on PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB adds
>> many "enterprise-readiness" features to the basic PostgreSQL product,
>> including database replication, and much more.
>>
>
> The replication-in-core vs. not-in-core has absolutely nothing to do with
> EnterpriseDB either way. I think you'd be doing a disservice to your readers
> by implying that it does. Or with the GPL. If you want to blog about these
> things, maybe break them up into seperate posts?
>
>
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