Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 09:36:13PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> No, as Slony-I is not bundled with, or has anything to do with, this
> release ... Slony-I is a seperate, independent project developed by a
> commercial entity (Afilias) and released Open Source very early in its
> lifecycle ...

I want to clear up a possible misconception that I see in that
statement.  This is slightly off topic for the thread.  Sorry.

Afilias did not completely or even mostly develop Slony-I and then
release it.  Slony-I was intended, from the get-go, as a community
project.  We wanted the software developed in the community from the
start, so what we did was pay a member of the community to get the
project up and running.  Jan released the specs he had and the
prototype code he had before any "heavy lifting" work had been done
on the core Slony system.  If people had come along with "here's
another important feature that I want, here's how it fits with the
system and how I can integrate it, and I'm willing to add the code in
this module over here," then that would have been welcomed.  That's
what we want to have happen.

Afilias is not an RDBMS company nor a company which wants to spend a
great deal of time in that area.  We support these development
projects because it is in our interest to maintain a vibrant
community around them.  We are primarily just a user of the software.
That's all we want to be, because our business lies elsewhere.  For
the same reason that we participate in IETF working groups (they
produce standards in our industry -- essentially, part of our
infrastructure) we participate in the PostgreSQL community (also part
of our infrastructure).

I know this probably seems like picking nits, but I think the
difference in methodology is extremely important.  If you're
interested in the code we're contributing, and want to hack on it,
please do.  We are contributing things that scratch our itches, of
course, and we'll continue to do that.  But it's every bit as
important to us that nobody get the impression we have a big internal
program which occasionally puts out a complete piece of software to
the community.  That's not how we want to (or even how we can)
participate.

A

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Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Afilias Canada                        Toronto, Ontario Canada
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