John,
> I honestly do not mean any offence, just out of curiosity.
>
> If you guys care about money and time why would you spend the best years
> of your life basically copying commercial products for free?
We don't do it to copy commercial products. We do it to build something
better than them.
> I do not have experience with open source and I kind of thought open
> source guys do not need or care about money and time.
It's a common misapprehension that open source software is somehow
produced for free. The press has contributed to this myth a great deal
by calling open source "socialism" and "altruism". What's actually true
about open source is that the organization which releases the product
(the open source project) is not necessarily the same organzation which
pays the developers. However, if you look at any mature, large open
source project you will find that at least 1/4 of its code contributors
are paid to work on the project by *someone*, and that those paid
developers account for 70% to 95% of the code. PostgreSQL is no
exception to this rule.
The three differences between an open source project and proprietary
software in terms of adding new features are:
a) it's "pay or play", which means that you have the option of writing
the new feature yourself instead of funding it in cash, and
b) the cost of developing new features if you choose to fund them is
much cheaper (generally a couple orders of magnitude cheaper) than
proprietary software because of the open market for developers and
greater efficiency of OSS development, and
c) it's *much* easier for multiple companies to contribute to the same
project if that project is open source than if it's proprietary.
Ultimately, however, if a feature is going to be added to any OSS
project, that feature is going to be paid for by someone, either in
money, time, or both.
It does help us to get feedback like the feedback you gave eariler, even
if you can't contribute to the project because it helps us prioritize
new features. But you should recognize that if you're not contributing
money or time to the project, you may have a long wait for the feature
*you* want.
--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com
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