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Postgres, notably, has not had these problems. There's a thriving ecosystem, despite the trademark, and many providers offer "Postgres" services without Postgre

Postgres, notably, has not had these problems. There's a thriving ecosystem, despite the trademark, and many providers offer "Postgres" services without Postgres' core organizations or contributors getting their undies in a twist over it.

evanelias 2y ago
That's largely true, but there definitely have been incidents/drama in the recent past. Two that come to mind: https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-postgresql-core-team-on-the-edb-acquisition-of-2ndquadrant-2094/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos... https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-against-the-postgresql-community-2302/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai... Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.
mdasen 2y ago
I think a difference there is that Postgres doesn't have a for-profit semi-attached to it. There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution. That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project. Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.

evanelias 2y ago

That's largely true, but there definitely have been incidents/drama in the recent past. Two that come to mind: https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-postgresql-core-team-on-the-edb-acquisition-of-2ndquadrant-2094/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos... https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-against-the-postgresql-community-2302/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai... Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.

mdasen 2y ago

I think a difference there is that Postgres doesn't have a for-profit semi-attached to it. There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution. That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project. Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.