|
I found these excerpts interesting:
Josh Berkus
I've been involved with a number of open source
projects, and as I see it, there are three humps to get over before you are a
âbig project.â The number one is when you go from being one developer to being
multiple developers. Number two is when you pick up momentum among open source
users, when people you never met before start jumping on mailing lists and
saying, âHey, I've used the software, is there anything can I do to help you
out.â That gets you a certain distance, and then when you grow even further in
that direction to reach the third hump, where rather than just individuals,
companies start saying âHey, you've got a cool project, we use the software, we
want to contribute, we want to be publicly involved with your project, it's good
for our PR, too.â
.....
So, overall, there has been a huge reaction, and one of
the things that I am encouraged by is that the Windows port has resulted in over
100,000 downloads and new users, potentially, people who weren't able to use
PostgreSQL before because they didn't have access to experts on Linux or FreeBSD
or Solaris or other Unix-like operating systems. And that's going to continue to
help grow our community.
....
Openness is not only part of our design, but part of
our culture. The idea being that PostreSQL is there for you to hack. If you need
something that most users don't need, or don't use, but it's special for your
project or your business goal, you can go ahead and hack it. That, combined with
the business license, let's you go ahead and hack it, and then commercialize it.
You can even release under a commercial license. It's there to be completely,
100% free, and that's the main thing that attracts people to PostgreSQL.
We have been releasing a new version about once per
year for the last several years, and I don't see any reason for that pattern to
change. It's a good compromise between how often the developers would like to
release, which is about once every six months, and how often our users would
like us to release, which is actually more like once very 18
months.
|
