10 ms·

PostgreSQL community impact of 2nd Quadrant purchase

300 points by grzm 6y ago

sippingjippers 6y ago
This is def worth paying attention to, psql is one of the few genuinely good examples of well balanced business-private participation. Most enterprise open source is a shit show in some way or other
- pestaa 6y ago
  It sounds like a pessimistic outlook. I can name a few high profile OSS projects with proactive communities around them, but not one with the typical toxic office drama. Can you share some examples please?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
emddudley 6y ago
Wow, no discussion on Hacker News about this yet? This is a pretty big change in the PostgreSQL world! Someone did post the announcement, but it didn't get any attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24641251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24641251
CalmStorm 6y ago
Oracle’s ownership of MySQL AB seems to have negative impact on its development. My concern, which is also raised in the article, is whether similar things will happen to Postgresql.
- dfsegoat 6y ago
  This is why I am thankful that Percona [1] is already involved with PG. Percona created their own mysql distribution [2] with a number of improvements, which was quite helpful while awaiting (very long) release cycles from Oracle, for MySQL community. 1 - https://www.percona.com/software/postgresql-distribution https://www.percona.com/software/postgresql-distribution 2 - https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database
- pgaddict 6y ago
  I doubt that's possible, for a number of reasons. 1) Neither company owns any part of the PostgreSQL code / docs. We do have various proprietary tools, of course, but so do other companies. 2) The companies employ quite a few PostgreSQL hackers, but if you look at the development stats (e.g. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgresql.html http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgre...) you'll see there are many committers and developers in other companies. That being said, I agree with the concerns expressed by Bruce in his blog post. Or more precisely - I do understand why people in the community have those concerns, but I believe (hope) it's not going to harm the community.
brainless 6y ago
I was not aware (my ignorance) that there are such great companies built around PostgreSQL support and development and that so many core engineers of the product work there. I assumed the engineers are from much more diverse set of companies. Given how PostgreSQL has been growing, what is stopping more startups to build around this? The reason I ask is this is HN, which is part of YC - so many of us are (possible) founders. This looks like a growing B2B/Enterprise opportunity, or am I wrong?
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Support and consulting services generally aren't a good startup business model. Your revenue scales linearly with headcount which generally prevents hockey stick growth and massive revenue per employee numbers. It's why so many OSS based startups are doing SaaS models right now.
  - pgaddict 6y ago
    Yeah, that's true. That being said, there are various other companies providing this type of services around the world, although most of them are more local (but hey, anyone can be global with a zoom meeting now). There are also quite a few other companies doing other stuff, employing great PostgreSQL hackers and contributing to the community.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      I don't disagree that's it's a viable business model but just saying that it's generally not the kind of business model that the startup crowd (YC, venture funded, etc.) is looking for.
      - brainless 6y ago
        "Yet", I think you mean looking for yet. Ideas change. "Starting up" is the most basic phrase I was used to as a teenager, dreaming of businesses. Then some SV folks reimagined the word to make it mean something super niche. I am seeing a trend toward sustainable businesses nowadays. I am happy starting up a sustainable business, no matter what you might call it.
aidos 6y ago
> First, there is an unwritten rule that the Postgres core team should not have over half of its members from a single company, and the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60% — the core team is working on a solution for this. What solutions are they looking at?
- gberger 6y ago
  Presumably, they're either looking into adding more members from other companies, or reducing members from EDB (or both).
- pgaddict 6y ago
  I have no idea what options are being considered by the core team, but I'd imagine the most likely one is replacing one of the people now working for EDB with someone else.
- ioltas 6y ago
  Discussions within the core team are done on a private mailing list, so we'll know the status of things with a public announcement. Committers and contributors have no view of what gets discussed there, except if you are of course directly attached in CC of a given thread, and of course except if you are a committer also part of the core team. Four members of the current core team are committers.
hyperrail 6y ago
Bruce Momjian doesn't mention it in the OP blog post, but the PostgreSQL core team consists of just 5 people including himself: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ Keep that in mind when you note that he says: > the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60% This works out to 3 out of 5 people including Bruce himself.
- breakingcups 6y ago
  Wow, that is such a small core team.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  It's sort of mind boggling how few people underpin the infrastructure and software so many of us we depend on.
  - pgaddict 6y ago
    Keep in mind that "core team" does not mean "core developers" here. The PostgreSQL core team's responsibilities are more about governing the community (see https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/ https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/). When it comes to development, it might be better to look at committers, i.e. people with the right to commit stuff, recognized contributors, or even people who submitted patch to a recent commitfest: * https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers * https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ * https://commitfest.postgresql.org/29/ https://commitfest.postgresql.org/29/ And those groups are much larger and more diverse (in terms of employers). Plus if you look the the stats published by Robert Haas, some of the most active developers are working for other companies. Edit: That being said, I'd love to see people from other companies participating in the community, and I'm generally trying to help new contributors with their patches.
  - xapata 6y ago
    That's true outside of software as well. It's a complex world out there. Follow a thread far enough and you'll find that 7 billion people isn't very many after all.
craigkerstiens 6y ago
There are a couple big things that are probably useful context here. The first is the different between core team and committers. The core team is much more like a steering committee than anything else. The core team is responsible for various policy issues, coordinating broader release activities, and handling disciplinary issues. In contrast, committers are the ones that determine what code goes in and does not. The list of committers is about 30 people. And there are many people that work to contribute large pieces of code but not responsible for the final leg of committing. Edit: I've written a bit more before on all of the non-code bits of Postgres - http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/10/31/postgres-the-non-code-bits/ http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/10/31/postgres-the-non-co...
- rattray 6y ago
  What percentage of committers now work at EDB?
  - craigkerstiens 6y ago
    My quick count looks like it is either 4 or 5, out of roughly 30. So they may be at nearly 20%. It is on the higher end, but it's not something we haven't seen before that then changes/swings back another way.
    - rattray 6y ago
      Thanks! Agreed that's much less concerning. Congrats on the job change to https://www.crunchydata.com/ https://www.crunchydata.com/ btw! Hope you're able to continue your community-benefiting work there.
craigkerstiens 6y ago
A few personal thoughts on the various points raised. I've been in and around the community for quite some years. The acquisition hopefully was a good outcome for 2ndQuadrant and EDB. But I don't personally see it changing the landscape of providers. There are a lot of companies that offer support, consulting, and services for Postgres. 2ndQuadrant has long been one place I would refer people to in Europe, but less so in the US. While some friends do work in the US for them most of their engineering happens in EU. There is a lot of options in Europe still, from Dalibo to Cybertec to Postgres Professional. In the US you've had Crunchy Data, PGExperts, and EDB for some time (all of them in existence for longer than 5 years now). That has not changed, maybe we need more than this... but it isn't something to the scale of many other monopolies. The percentage of concentration on core is an issue and my outside of core understanding is that such is being addressed. For non-competes, perhaps this is a bigger issue than I realize. But being based in California I'm surprised to see this. Having worked at one place running and managing Postgres (Heroku) to then go to another to run and manage Postgres (Citus Data) to joining Microsoft to run and manage Postgres, I'm now doing similar at Crunchy Data building and running our multi-cloud Postgres service - https://www.crunchybridge.com https://www.crunchybridge.com. Perhaps non-competes are a big issue for some east coast or for European countries, but at least where I sit I'm surprised by that argument.
eecc 6y ago
So now it's just a matter of Oracle buying EDB? Does EDB have a poison pill clause and/or are the contracts of the core team free from non-competes and non-disclosures?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justinclift 6y ago
  If Oracle did buy EDB, then attempt to meaningfully screw the PG Community... ... then the PG Community would very likely fork to a new group of people and continue on growing just fine. See OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Hudson -> Jenkins, (etc)
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    And it would suck if non-competes locked the former EDB people out for a while, and it would take some reconstituting of governance, but it looks like a huge portion of contributions are outside of EDB even with the acquisition) so I suspect it would be rough patch that the community would weather, not an existential threat. MySQL’s licensing model gave MySQL AB (and thus it's purchasers) a privileged role that no one has with regard to Postgres. And even there, MariaDB is a thing...
ggm 6y ago
I have increased respect for a project which can call this stuff out. Its good to see. I was disheartened when MySQL folded into states of being I didn't like (as a pure consumer) I use PG. I like PG. I like how the PG core self-police.
akersten 6y ago
This is off-topic, but I wound up on 2nd Quadrant's website while reading this. Isn't their logo indicating the 1st Quadrant? Or is there an alternative cartesian labeling I'm unaware of?
- insulanian 6y ago
  I think I have read somewhere that it refers to the "leaders" quadrant in Gartner's magic quadrant.
- ptman 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(plane_geometry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(plane_geometry)
  - SSLy 6y ago
    Yes, logo marks the first.
- MarkusWinand 6y ago
  What Does ‘2ndQuadrant’ Mean?: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/what-does-2ndquadrant-mean/ https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/what-does-2ndquadrant-mean/
marco_craveiro 6y ago
A bit of topic, but bear with me please :-) does anyone knowif EDB plans to (or already has) open sourced their Postgres Oracle compatibility layer?
hyperman1 6y ago
It's the first time I see an open source project publicly letting the world know about this kind of issue. This is boring and hard but important work, and it happens in the open and in a very professional way. Thanks, postgresql.
rattray 6y ago
This post feels, to me, like a call for new postgres service companies to spring up. Not SaaS startups, but services-first products-second consultants who know postgres inside out and can solve hard problems that development teams don't have the time or expertise to. Sounds like a fun way to go for many needs seeking independence and continued human interaction (as opposed to one-person-saas).
ksec 6y ago
The biggest news to me is EDB acquired 2nd Quadrant. Which somehow didn't hit the HN front page. Would there be more features coming to Open Source Postgre, or is Postgre now a Postgre Core where Enterprise features get moved to EDB?

300 points by grzm 6y ago

This is def worth paying attention to, psql is one of the few genuinely good examples of well balanced business-private participation. Most enterprise open source is a shit show in some way or other

pestaa 6y ago
It sounds like a pessimistic outlook. I can name a few high profile OSS projects with proactive communities around them, but not one with the typical toxic office drama. Can you share some examples please?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

emddudley 6y ago

Wow, no discussion on Hacker News about this yet? This is a pretty big change in the PostgreSQL world! Someone did post the announcement, but it didn't get any attention. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24641251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24641251

CalmStorm 6y ago

Oracle’s ownership of MySQL AB seems to have negative impact on its development. My concern, which is also raised in the article, is whether similar things will happen to Postgresql.

dfsegoat 6y ago
This is why I am thankful that Percona [1] is already involved with PG. Percona created their own mysql distribution [2] with a number of improvements, which was quite helpful while awaiting (very long) release cycles from Oracle, for MySQL community. 1 - https://www.percona.com/software/postgresql-distribution https://www.percona.com/software/postgresql-distribution 2 - https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database
pgaddict 6y ago
I doubt that's possible, for a number of reasons. 1) Neither company owns any part of the PostgreSQL code / docs. We do have various proprietary tools, of course, but so do other companies. 2) The companies employ quite a few PostgreSQL hackers, but if you look at the development stats (e.g. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgresql.html http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2020/05/who-contributed-to-postgre...) you'll see there are many committers and developers in other companies. That being said, I agree with the concerns expressed by Bruce in his blog post. Or more precisely - I do understand why people in the community have those concerns, but I believe (hope) it's not going to harm the community.

brainless 6y ago

I was not aware (my ignorance) that there are such great companies built around PostgreSQL support and development and that so many core engineers of the product work there. I assumed the engineers are from much more diverse set of companies. Given how PostgreSQL has been growing, what is stopping more startups to build around this? The reason I ask is this is HN, which is part of YC - so many of us are (possible) founders. This looks like a growing B2B/Enterprise opportunity, or am I wrong?

marcinzm 6y ago
Support and consulting services generally aren't a good startup business model. Your revenue scales linearly with headcount which generally prevents hockey stick growth and massive revenue per employee numbers. It's why so many OSS based startups are doing SaaS models right now.
- pgaddict 6y ago
  Yeah, that's true. That being said, there are various other companies providing this type of services around the world, although most of them are more local (but hey, anyone can be global with a zoom meeting now). There are also quite a few other companies doing other stuff, employing great PostgreSQL hackers and contributing to the community.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I don't disagree that's it's a viable business model but just saying that it's generally not the kind of business model that the startup crowd (YC, venture funded, etc.) is looking for.
    - brainless 6y ago
      "Yet", I think you mean looking for yet. Ideas change. "Starting up" is the most basic phrase I was used to as a teenager, dreaming of businesses. Then some SV folks reimagined the word to make it mean something super niche. I am seeing a trend toward sustainable businesses nowadays. I am happy starting up a sustainable business, no matter what you might call it.

aidos 6y ago

> First, there is an unwritten rule that the Postgres core team should not have over half of its members from a single company, and the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60% — the core team is working on a solution for this. What solutions are they looking at?

gberger 6y ago
Presumably, they're either looking into adding more members from other companies, or reducing members from EDB (or both).
pgaddict 6y ago
I have no idea what options are being considered by the core team, but I'd imagine the most likely one is replacing one of the people now working for EDB with someone else.
ioltas 6y ago
Discussions within the core team are done on a private mailing list, so we'll know the status of things with a public announcement. Committers and contributors have no view of what gets discussed there, except if you are of course directly attached in CC of a given thread, and of course except if you are a committer also part of the core team. Four members of the current core team are committers.

hyperrail 6y ago

Bruce Momjian doesn't mention it in the OP blog post, but the PostgreSQL core team consists of just 5 people including himself: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ Keep that in mind when you note that he says: > the acquisition causes edb's representation in the core team to be 60% This works out to 3 out of 5 people including Bruce himself.

breakingcups 6y ago
Wow, that is such a small core team.
marcinzm 6y ago
It's sort of mind boggling how few people underpin the infrastructure and software so many of us we depend on.
- pgaddict 6y ago
  Keep in mind that "core team" does not mean "core developers" here. The PostgreSQL core team's responsibilities are more about governing the community (see https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/ https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/). When it comes to development, it might be better to look at committers, i.e. people with the right to commit stuff, recognized contributors, or even people who submitted patch to a recent commitfest: * https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Committers * https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ * https://commitfest.postgresql.org/29/ https://commitfest.postgresql.org/29/ And those groups are much larger and more diverse (in terms of employers). Plus if you look the the stats published by Robert Haas, some of the most active developers are working for other companies. Edit: That being said, I'd love to see people from other companies participating in the community, and I'm generally trying to help new contributors with their patches.
- xapata 6y ago
  That's true outside of software as well. It's a complex world out there. Follow a thread far enough and you'll find that 7 billion people isn't very many after all.

craigkerstiens 6y ago

There are a couple big things that are probably useful context here. The first is the different between core team and committers. The core team is much more like a steering committee than anything else. The core team is responsible for various policy issues, coordinating broader release activities, and handling disciplinary issues. In contrast, committers are the ones that determine what code goes in and does not. The list of committers is about 30 people. And there are many people that work to contribute large pieces of code but not responsible for the final leg of committing. Edit: I've written a bit more before on all of the non-code bits of Postgres - http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/10/31/postgres-the-non-code-bits/ http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/10/31/postgres-the-non-co...

rattray 6y ago
What percentage of committers now work at EDB?
- craigkerstiens 6y ago
  My quick count looks like it is either 4 or 5, out of roughly 30. So they may be at nearly 20%. It is on the higher end, but it's not something we haven't seen before that then changes/swings back another way.
  - rattray 6y ago
    Thanks! Agreed that's much less concerning. Congrats on the job change to https://www.crunchydata.com/ https://www.crunchydata.com/ btw! Hope you're able to continue your community-benefiting work there.

craigkerstiens 6y ago

A few personal thoughts on the various points raised. I've been in and around the community for quite some years. The acquisition hopefully was a good outcome for 2ndQuadrant and EDB. But I don't personally see it changing the landscape of providers. There are a lot of companies that offer support, consulting, and services for Postgres. 2ndQuadrant has long been one place I would refer people to in Europe, but less so in the US. While some friends do work in the US for them most of their engineering happens in EU. There is a lot of options in Europe still, from Dalibo to Cybertec to Postgres Professional. In the US you've had Crunchy Data, PGExperts, and EDB for some time (all of them in existence for longer than 5 years now). That has not changed, maybe we need more than this... but it isn't something to the scale of many other monopolies. The percentage of concentration on core is an issue and my outside of core understanding is that such is being addressed. For non-competes, perhaps this is a bigger issue than I realize. But being based in California I'm surprised to see this. Having worked at one place running and managing Postgres (Heroku) to then go to another to run and manage Postgres (Citus Data) to joining Microsoft to run and manage Postgres, I'm now doing similar at Crunchy Data building and running our multi-cloud Postgres service - https://www.crunchybridge.com https://www.crunchybridge.com. Perhaps non-competes are a big issue for some east coast or for European countries, but at least where I sit I'm surprised by that argument.

eecc 6y ago

So now it's just a matter of Oracle buying EDB? Does EDB have a poison pill clause and/or are the contracts of the core team free from non-competes and non-disclosures?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justinclift 6y ago
If Oracle did buy EDB, then attempt to meaningfully screw the PG Community... ... then the PG Community would very likely fork to a new group of people and continue on growing just fine. See OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Hudson -> Jenkins, (etc)
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  And it would suck if non-competes locked the former EDB people out for a while, and it would take some reconstituting of governance, but it looks like a huge portion of contributions are outside of EDB even with the acquisition) so I suspect it would be rough patch that the community would weather, not an existential threat. MySQL’s licensing model gave MySQL AB (and thus it's purchasers) a privileged role that no one has with regard to Postgres. And even there, MariaDB is a thing...

ggm 6y ago

I have increased respect for a project which can call this stuff out. Its good to see. I was disheartened when MySQL folded into states of being I didn't like (as a pure consumer) I use PG. I like PG. I like how the PG core self-police.

akersten 6y ago

This is off-topic, but I wound up on 2nd Quadrant's website while reading this. Isn't their logo indicating the 1st Quadrant? Or is there an alternative cartesian labeling I'm unaware of?

insulanian 6y ago
I think I have read somewhere that it refers to the "leaders" quadrant in Gartner's magic quadrant.
ptman 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(plane_geometry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(plane_geometry)
- SSLy 6y ago
  Yes, logo marks the first.
MarkusWinand 6y ago
What Does ‘2ndQuadrant’ Mean?: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/what-does-2ndquadrant-mean/ https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/what-does-2ndquadrant-mean/

marco_craveiro 6y ago

A bit of topic, but bear with me please :-) does anyone knowif EDB plans to (or already has) open sourced their Postgres Oracle compatibility layer?

hyperman1 6y ago

It's the first time I see an open source project publicly letting the world know about this kind of issue. This is boring and hard but important work, and it happens in the open and in a very professional way. Thanks, postgresql.

rattray 6y ago

This post feels, to me, like a call for new postgres service companies to spring up. Not SaaS startups, but services-first products-second consultants who know postgres inside out and can solve hard problems that development teams don't have the time or expertise to. Sounds like a fun way to go for many needs seeking independence and continued human interaction (as opposed to one-person-saas).

ksec 6y ago

The biggest news to me is EDB acquired 2nd Quadrant. Which somehow didn't hit the HN front page. Would there be more features coming to Open Source Postgre, or is Postgre now a Postgre Core where Enterprise features get moved to EDB?