Re: Managing the community information stream

Jim Nasby wrote:
> On May 8, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 07:36:55AM -0500, Jim Nasby wrote:
>>> Instead, if all feature requests are tracked then users can vote on
>>> what's most important to them.
>>
>> I am sympathetic to the issues you and Andrew are describing (I
>> understand Bruce's stream analogy, but I think Andrew is right that
>> from the user's point of view, it's not usable).  But I am not
>> convinced that users voting on desired features will get us the
>> users' desired features.  The features we get are mostly the features
>> that have attracted developers.  The method by which that attraction
>> happens is interesting, but I don't think it's democratic.
> 
> It may... it may not. If a high-demand feature sits around long enough 
> it could well attract someone capable of working on it, but who isn't a 
> current contributor. Or it could attract a bounty.

Also keep in mind that many of the developers are working for companies 
that ensure that resources get allocated according to what users need 
and not only by what developers are motivated to work on.

That being said, it seems obvious that so far PostgreSQL has been mainly 
driven by what developers feel like implementing. I think this is also 
what ensured the high level of standards compliance of PostgreSQL, since 
features were tailored for experienced DBA types, rather than end users 
that are less experienced in how to leverage these standards.

regards,
Lukas