Sorry for the late(ish) response.

All:
Remember, these notes were taken *verbatim* from the talk. They were my feelings. They’re what one might consider a transcript. There is unfortunately no recording of the talk…

Joshua:
1. No worries with regards to EnterpriseDB…
2. Honest you were, but the tone was pretty confrontational. Let us not speculate as to why he brought up the problem, irrespective if Sun was in the room or not.

Thanks for linking to the rest of your blog posts. You also mention that you spoke with Marten Mickos quite a bit, and he’s supported having your talk. Note that I do not say having your talk was bad, or anything, I just clearly write notes from it…

William:
The process is being opened up, its just facing what I’d like to refer to as, growing pains.

Joshua:
Monty’s talk highlighted all of our growing pains.

Mark:
There is no ETA. The plan is the plan, until there is a new plan? We all want changes, but we have to go through step-by-step refinement.

The CLA is unfortunately still around. We are looking into the SCA soon. Curiously, why can’t someone from a big company sign the SCA? Novell for example, I know have signed the SCA for OpenOffice.org contributions.

Community branch is something as you know we’ve been trying to work out for a while. I think once we’ve fixed our release policy, we can focus on accepting patches, say like the HEAP tables patch and other great patches that you yourself have.

Josh Berkus:
Congratulations on patching PostgreSQL and providing core level patches in under-2 weeks :)

If someone is unhappy with MySQL support, they’re also not a slave to Sun. There are numerous firms out there that are the EnterpriseDB/CommandPrompt equivalents in the MySQL ecosystem.

It should be noted that the only Fox issue that came up was the in place upgrade issue because that have a 5TB database (they said this publicly). Which is what drove the whole discussion.

Anyway as usual you are spot on with the community, that is our strength. Any vendor is secondary to the user of the database. It doesn’t matter if it is Command Prompt, EDB or Sun. Those vendors have to work with the community directly if they want to be the most productive, if those vendors don’t then the customer/user has the ability to come to the community and the community will respond.

Disclaimer: I work for Command Prompt.

I’m actually familiar with Fox’s issues, and it’s not clear that their PostgreSQL issues are even *PostgreSQL* bugs, except for one, which Sun patched and will be in the next PostgreSQL minor release. Try getting a core-level patch in less than 2 weeks from Oracle.

However, you *have* pointed out another strength of the PostgreSQL community — if FIM is unhappy with Sun’s support of their PostgreSQL, they can go to EnterpriseDB or CommandPrompt. They’re not a slave to one vendor.

Will the contributor license change? If you work at a big company you will probably be unable to sign the MySQL CLA and the Sun SCA might not be any better.

Will there be a community branch? Ebay just published a great patch for HEAP tables. The patch is GPL. If there were a GPL community branch it could go there.

What I found interesting is that Monty’s talk mirrored (according to reports) many of my points in my talk. So yes I would agree they are likely moving in that direction.

I agree with most of the comments. However, I was tasked with deciding between PostGres and Mysql a couple years ago. We didn’t want to pay for support so we looked at the communities around each product and decided that Mysql’s community support was better. It was easier to get help with it from various blog posts /mailing lists than Postgres at the time. At least that was our perception.

The Mysql community is starting to organize itself, and Sun/Mysql AB has talked about opening up the development process to the community more. So I think we are moving closer to what Postgres has, although it still remains the gold standard for Open source community driven development.

1. EnterpriseDB is the opposite, they’re closing up more and more.

I spoke with Bob Zurek who is the CTO of EnterpriseDB. I was not 100% correct in my EnterpriseDB comment. My reference came from this page: http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus_as.do which is very difficult to tell which is Open Source and which is not. However I still think they true benefit would be to just open everything up.

2. Boy, I didn’t think I attacked the guy from Fox Interactive Media. I was just being honest. The gentlemen would not have brought up the problem (especially with Sun in the room) if Sun was correctly addressing his needs.

If Fox Interactive Media wants a solution to that 5TB problem, interacting with the community is the way to get that problem resolved. Sun may or may not be a part of the solution at that point, I would like to think that Sun would actually interact with the community to solve the problem as a whole. They recently did submit a WIP patch on the very topic, but the response has been fairly tepid, I believe because of bad communication from Sun. Keep in mind that I said, “regardless of the factors involved, the solution is still the same, you have to go through the community.”. That point was made at benefit of Sun. Sun can solve the problem on their own, but if they don’t work with the community to do so, they end up with a Fork and now they maintain three databases (JavaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL).

I actually talk a little more about this here:

http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/04/what_mysql_and_really_sun_can_learn_from_postgresql/