Re: Companies Contributing to Open Source

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 22:04 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
> > >> I remember the president of Great Bridge
> > >> saying that the company needs the community, but not visa-vera --- if
> > >> the company dies, the community keeps going (as it did after Great
> > >> Bridge, without a hickup), but if the community dies, the company dies
> > >> too. 
> > 
> > > I 95% agree here. If EDB or CMD were go to down in flames, it could hurt
> > > the community quite a bit.
> > 
> > Josh, I hate to burst your bubble, but Great Bridge employed a much
> > larger fraction of the hacker-community-at-the-time than either EDB or
> > CMD do today.  We survived that, and if EDB or CMD or Greenplum or the
> > entire lot went down tomorrow, we'd survive that too.
> 
> I never once suggested that the community would not survive. I said it
> would hurt productivity for "n" amount of time.
> 
> Let's just be realistic here:
> 
> In one fails swoop:
> 
> Devrim, Alvaro, Darcy, Heikki, Bruce, Simon, Greg, Dave, Marc and I are
> all suddenly looking for employment...
> 
> You don't think there would be an issue that could cause some grief to
> the community? Is it surmountable? Of course, that isn't the point. The
> point is that it is not painless. 

Yes, that does seem painful.  I would hope than any vibrant open source
community would have other companies who would have new jobs for many of
these individuals, but I also hope some could continue as volunteers if
they don't get sponsored jobs.  

I know when Great Bridge closed, most of the community people had new
jobs almost immediately.

--  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +