A Little Bit Closed
April 16th, 2008
The MySQL conference is currently underway in Santa Clara and I’ve been watching the newswire and blogs for announcements and feedback. Yesterday I read in Jeremy Cole’s blog that Sun is holding back some vital features from the MySQL open source community, and providing those features only to their enterprise customers. Marten Mikos confirmed this and attempted to justify it in a comment posted on the blog. Regular readers of my blog will remember that in December I commented on the serious mistakes being made by Sun in open source, and this is another one that I’d add to that list. To be a little bit closed source is like being a “a little bit pregnant”. Either you’re open source and everything is done in the open, or you’re not. Holding back features such as on-line backup for enterprise customers only is unacceptable and it’s good to see the MySQL community calling Sun on this one. Ingres community and enterprise editions are built from the same source tree, we don’t hold back any functionality from the community edition. In addition, code that we receive from our community is delivered back to the Ingres user community in both editions.
On a related note, I heard a startling statistic from the PostgreSQL community yesterday, that less than 20% of the changes that are submitted by the community are accepted into the project. With Ingres we make every effort to accept all changes. We are involved with the community every step of the way, before, during, and after implementation and we’re always looking for new community developers, so if you’ve tried and been unsuccesful in engaging with PostgreSQL, then please come join the Ingres project. We will welcome you with open arms.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Agree completely, It is so hard to build a strong community and sad to see projects with such little regard for their community.
http://blogs.ingres.com/tech/
April 17th, 2008 at 9:08 am
The meaning of Open Source and Community is completely tarnished by the announcements being made, and from what experience I have seen with PostgreSQL, the chances of getting community code into the product is spread across various geographies and petty polytics, thus leaving developers disoriented.
INGRES ROCKS!
April 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am
You’re observation regarding the importance of truly doing development in the open is one that Sun does seem to have missed.
In response to a mailing list missive from Sun’s John Plocer, http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-March/005174.html, IBM’s Ted Ts’o recently picked up on the same issue present in the Open Solaris community Sun was trying to foster:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/19/what-sun-was-trying-to-do-with-open-solaris/
Ted later elaborated on distinctions between different open source, musing on the differences between “organic” and “non-organic” open source projects. Sun’s Open Solaris would be an example of the latter, attempting to transition from a project open in name only to one genuinely open with active community involvement.
Sadly, they seem to have stumbled with respect to successfully engaging with the development community and the result has been that Open Solaris has attracted limited amount of developer interest in participating in the Open Solaris project after three years.
Given the community contributor encouragement in the above post, Ingress seems to be making a similar attempt at moving from a non-organic open source project to an organic one. I applaud your efforts in this regard, but would caution you to learn from Sun’s MySQL and Open Solaris examples. Communities are difficult to create and require nurturing. Perusing the Ingres issue tracking, wiki, and source control systems, it is clear that the right steps are being made but that Ingress too has quite a ways to go.
In that, I wish you and your talented team the best of luck.