At 12:12 AM 5/12/2002 -0500, Robert Treat wrote:
> > What are the consequences of the problem? >One consequence that probably hits home for everyone here is it makes it extremely hard to make a living working with postgresql.
...
I am happy with increasing market share so long a development is not distorted or current users inconvenienced. We have seen the latter with the misplaced announcements. And the former because I am writing this on -hackers, rather than implementing dependency-tracking in pg_dump ;-).You can't win marketshare on technology alone
Good point. Market Share -> Influence ->Corprate Support -> more features -> market share....lots of stuff deleted... Marketing is very relevant to existing customers.
Gaining market share *is* a natural consequence of improving the product; marketing is about convincing people a product has improved, even if it hasn't. Advocacy is about telling people about the product as it is - and I have no problem with that, with the above proviso.
<diatribe>Aren't most development efforts made simply to gain market share?
I seriously hope not - in fact I would find that very depressing.
In my opinion, anyone who devotes their personal free time to an open source development project probably has a slew of complex motivations that have little to do with market share. Perhaps the closest they would come would be to say "I want to make it better", and in some peoples minds, "better" is measured by market share.
In my case, development I did on other open source projects (libgd) was driven by a philosophical objection to application of patents to software in the US, and to a need for particular features (gd2 format, & gif support). My work on PG is driven by a desire to make the product more useful (to me), more usable (for me), and by a philosophical belief in the importance of free & open software. The fact that other people (& I) profit from this work is great. In any case, market share, for me, is at best a third order influence - and I assume that's true for most people who contribute to OS software. Although I do admit that there is a natural tendency to want "your team" to win.
</diatribe>
I am not sure why it was added, and it's sufficiently esoteric and large that I doubt market share was an issue. If we wanted market share, then online-vacuum and online-upgrade would have been the big-hitters.After all, I don't think we added schema support to get *less* people to use postgresql.
My guess is that it was done because we did not support it, it is in the SQL standard, and it solved a number of issues that caused existing users & developers problems. It was probably also an interesting project. Maybe I'm wrong...
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