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If the creators of Postgres wanted all improvements to be upstreamed, they wouldn’t have released under a permissive license. The ability to use Postgres commer

If the creators of Postgres wanted all improvements to be upstreamed, they wouldn’t have released under a permissive license. The ability to use Postgres commercially without exposing your entire codebase to copyleft risk is one of the reasons it’s used commercially in the first place.

rch 8y ago
The good news is that we'll have another reliable, growing, potentially profitable, PostgreSQL company up and running in no time.
cdbattags 8y ago
100% agree. I'm just weary of all these "mini optimizations" that all these cloud providers are about to start doing differently.
- scarface74 8y ago
  They don’t have a choice. Their infrastructure is different. For instance, Aurora integrates with IAM for authentication and has extensions to load and save to S3. Aurora writes to six different disks across three availability zones and read replicas are synchronous because they read from one of the disks that Aurora is already writing to for high availability. You can’t get those types of features in a vendor neutral way.
  - anarazel 8y ago
    The IAM stuff requires using a few hooks, at most adding minor modifications that could be upstreamed. Storage is obviously harder, but I and others are working on making that pluggable in core. Amazon's core contribution, from a few smaller things like commandline tools: 0. Sorry, not buying it.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect or "It couldn't be that hard. I could make a Twitter clone in a week by hiring some people from UpWork" Did I mention point in time recovery or the architecture behind Serverless Aurora?
      - anarazel 8y ago
        Yea, right... I don't know anything about how hard this stuff is, I'm just a postgres developer & committer, currently working on making postgres' storage pluggable.
    - CWuestefeld 8y ago
      While not offering commits, I was under the impression that Amazon had contributed some funding. But I just went off searching for that, and can't find any evidence of this either. Anybody know anything about them contributing money rather than code?
      - anarazel 8y ago
        They've provided AWS credits, yes.
scarface74 8y ago
And this is a benefit to prevent lock-in. Amazon’s OLAP database, Redshift, is protocol compliant with Postgres. Even if you won’t get the performance benefits of Redshift if you move to a standard Postgres, at least you don’t have to change your code. Now you can move to Azure without having to change your code.
- Someone 8y ago
  That doesn’t really prevent lock-in. You may not be locked in now, but that compatibility can end whenever Amazon wants it to end.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If that compatibility ends, it might as well be a new product. Every client that connects to Redshift uses a standard Postgres driver.
CodesInChaos 8y ago
When I publish code using a permissive license I want people to contribute back under the same license. But I don't want to force them to.
basilgohar 8y ago
This is a big assumption. There are many reasons to release something as copyleft – not everyone that releases BSD-like is actively choosing to deprioritize upstreaming. Rather, they are choosing a license that is less restrictive which has other advantages beyond non-copyleft. Moreover, using copyleft software doesn't mean using forces you to release code. There are specific interactions that trigger the sharing clause in, for example, the GPL, such as distribution, linking, and so on. There remain many, many uses that allow commercialization that do not run afoul of the copyleft nature of the GPL. I am commenting because I have seen this sentiment repeated ad nauseum on here and, maybe that's not what you meant, but I felt the need to clarify. Moreover, if the code is not AGPL, most online uses do not run afoul, because the code product (say executables) are not themselves being distributed. AGPL was formulated to close this loophole, but GPL code is free from this.

rch 8y ago

The good news is that we'll have another reliable, growing, potentially profitable, PostgreSQL company up and running in no time.

cdbattags 8y ago

100% agree. I'm just weary of all these "mini optimizations" that all these cloud providers are about to start doing differently.

scarface74 8y ago
They don’t have a choice. Their infrastructure is different. For instance, Aurora integrates with IAM for authentication and has extensions to load and save to S3. Aurora writes to six different disks across three availability zones and read replicas are synchronous because they read from one of the disks that Aurora is already writing to for high availability. You can’t get those types of features in a vendor neutral way.
- anarazel 8y ago
  The IAM stuff requires using a few hooks, at most adding minor modifications that could be upstreamed. Storage is obviously harder, but I and others are working on making that pluggable in core. Amazon's core contribution, from a few smaller things like commandline tools: 0. Sorry, not buying it.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect or "It couldn't be that hard. I could make a Twitter clone in a week by hiring some people from UpWork" Did I mention point in time recovery or the architecture behind Serverless Aurora?
    - anarazel 8y ago
      Yea, right... I don't know anything about how hard this stuff is, I'm just a postgres developer & committer, currently working on making postgres' storage pluggable.
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    While not offering commits, I was under the impression that Amazon had contributed some funding. But I just went off searching for that, and can't find any evidence of this either. Anybody know anything about them contributing money rather than code?
    - anarazel 8y ago
      They've provided AWS credits, yes.

scarface74 8y ago

And this is a benefit to prevent lock-in. Amazon’s OLAP database, Redshift, is protocol compliant with Postgres. Even if you won’t get the performance benefits of Redshift if you move to a standard Postgres, at least you don’t have to change your code. Now you can move to Azure without having to change your code.

Someone 8y ago
That doesn’t really prevent lock-in. You may not be locked in now, but that compatibility can end whenever Amazon wants it to end.
- scarface74 8y ago
  If that compatibility ends, it might as well be a new product. Every client that connects to Redshift uses a standard Postgres driver.

CodesInChaos 8y ago

When I publish code using a permissive license I want people to contribute back under the same license. But I don't want to force them to.

basilgohar 8y ago

This is a big assumption. There are many reasons to release something as copyleft – not everyone that releases BSD-like is actively choosing to deprioritize upstreaming. Rather, they are choosing a license that is less restrictive which has other advantages beyond non-copyleft. Moreover, using copyleft software doesn't mean using forces you to release code. There are specific interactions that trigger the sharing clause in, for example, the GPL, such as distribution, linking, and so on. There remain many, many uses that allow commercialization that do not run afoul of the copyleft nature of the GPL. I am commenting because I have seen this sentiment repeated ad nauseum on here and, maybe that's not what you meant, but I felt the need to clarify. Moreover, if the code is not AGPL, most online uses do not run afoul, because the code product (say executables) are not themselves being distributed. AGPL was formulated to close this loophole, but GPL code is free from this.