Re: Proposal to add --single-row to psql - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net> wrote:
> On 4/28/13 7:50 AM, Craig Ringer wrote:
>>
>> I find it frustrating that I've never seen an @paraccel email address here
>> and that few of the other vendors of highly customised Pg offshoots are
>> contributing back. It's almost enough to make me like the GPL.
>
> FWIW, I think there's a pretty large barrier to these folks contributing
> back. Would the community really want to add a bunch of hooks to support
> something like Redshift? Or Greenplum? Or etc, etc.? Most of these guys have
> to change significant amounts of PG code, so much so that it's actually hard
> for them to stay current (which is why most of them just fork).
>
> I do think this is a shame, but I'm not sure of any good way to fix it.

Yep.  There are plenty of things that we do at EDB for good and valid
business reasons that I can't imagine the community accepting under
any circumstances.  For example, Oracle compatibility is not something
the community values as highly as EnterpriseDB (and our customers) do.I'm sure that many of those vendors are in
similarsituations - they
 
write code that only runs on specialized hardware, or (rather
commonly, I suspect) they remove parts of the functionality in order
to make certain things very fast.  Those are not trade-offs that make
sense for PostgreSQL, but I find it hard to understand what we'd gain
from preventing other people from making them.  There are in fact a
pretty large number of companies - EnterpriseDB, obviously, but there
are many, many others - that are choosing to build businesses around
PostgreSQL precisely because it *isn't* GPL.  Personally, I think
that's a good thing for our community in terms of mindshare even when
companies choose not to contribute back - and it's even better when
they do.

I was at the MySQL show a couple of years back and they had a vendor
area.  And I got talking to one the vendors there who had implemented
some new kind of database - I forget the details exactly - and he told
me that it spoke the PostgreSQL wire protocol.  I was of course a bit
surprised as PostgreSQL was not exactly what people at this show were
excited about.  So I asked him why not the MySQL wire protocol, and
he, basically, that they were afraid of being accused of a GPL
violation, because MySQL AB had a very expansive interpretation of
what the GPL did and did not allow.  We could perhaps argue about
whether he was right to be worried about that... but he was.  I can't
think of all the names right now, but I've talked with a bunch of
other companies over the last few years who also chose PostgreSQL for
licensing reasons.  I'm pretty happy about that.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company