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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/commu
by 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 agoWow, that is such a small core team.
- marcinzm 6y agoIt's sort of mind boggling how few people underpin the infrastructure and software so many of us we depend on.
- pgaddict 6y agoKeep 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 agoThat'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.
- wtracy 6y agoIf so, one or two companies could handle fix this problem by dedicating an employee to working on Postgres. Unfortunately, most of the likely candidates with money to throw around have their own pet database systems, and don't have in interest in Postgres. Maybe one of the mid-sized cloud providers like Digital Ocean would be interested?
- pgaddict 6y agoGoogle the names of the committers and major contributors, and you'll see many are working for quite large enterprise-y companies ;-) Obviously, if more companies start supporting the community, that'd be even better.
- mrich 6y agoThere are many Postgres forks out there. Maybe the solution will be to have someone from EDB step down, and add e.g. an active contributor from Amazon to the core team?
- anarazel 6y agoAmazon is not exactly a large contributor to postgres...
- dragonwriter 6y ago> an active contributor from Amazon to the core team? That would be weird, since Amazon has no major contributors. NTT, Microsoft, Fujitsu, or another seat for Crunchy Data (among other possibilities) would seem to be more natural choices than giving a seat to Amazon, looking at major contributors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- antb123 6y agoFujitsu is the longest standing large company.
- 6y ago
- thejobsdev 6y agoHow much depends on so few in tech always amazes me. Go on any major project and see the contributors and the distribution of commits between the top 5-10 vs everyone else and it's almost always startling.
- jrott 6y agoIt's always pretty shocking. You even see it at big companies where you'll only have a few engineers working on the core product and then a ton of people working on supporting infrastructure (analytics, marketing and what have you) around them.
- anarazel 6y agoNote that the postgres core team aren't all developing postgres itself, and that there's a vastly larger number of people working on postgres than the core team. They're basically "just" a body to escalate things to.
- jpz 6y agoPareto's Principle arises everywhere.
- justinclift 6y agoThe core team is kept that way on purpose. They're a decision making group (eg project direction), and the size doesn't reflect the number of active developers on the project in any way. eg there are a lot more active developers than there are "core team"
- derefr 6y agoSeems like a more accurate title for this group, then, would be "core maintainers" — or even "board of trustees."
- inopinatus 6y agoIt's 2020, why are we still telling people what they're supposed to call themselves? They could style as The Choir of the Aztounding Relational Pachyderm for all it ought to matter. Notwithstanding which, it's pretty conventional for the role of FOSS project core teams to be administrative-deliberative stewardship and an umbrella authority for all project activities. The overlap with membership of the developer community and concern for technical outcomes is a function of the domain, not the team purpose. The governance consequence at hand being that representational proportions matter to preserve independence and the appearance thereof.
- mrslave 6y agoI can't tell if this is a dig at the elaborate job titles we have today (Director of Creative, Employee Journey Advisor, Sales Engineer, Chief Happiness Officer, etc.) or progressive identity politics (pronouns, etc.). Perhaps they're not unrelated.
- danielheath 6y ago"The Choir of the Aztounding Relational Pachyderm" is exactly the kind of group name I would have expected to see in 90s hacker circles (similar to eg the group that produces POC || GTFO - "PASTOR MANUL LAPHROAIG AND HIS MERRY BAND OF REVERSE ENGINEERS").
- owens99 6y agoWhy does this fact make a difference? His point still stands pretty strongly in light of this keep in mind comment.