Fun fact: Ingres was the brainchild of the brilliant Professor Michael Stonebraker. After the company went under after being beaten by Oracle in the RDBMS marketplace, he open-sourced the DB as a shot against Larry Ellison. Hence it’s name, “Post-Ingres”, or Postgres.

Also, I believe his version of SQL was called QUEL, and we would have been using that term today had Ingres won out.

Your history got me interested so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Based on the info there, POSTGRES or Post-Ingres was a new project that he started after Ingres, and based on its concepts, but not using the Ingres code. PostgreSQL is based on the POSTGRES code which was licensed BSD from the outset.

There's a timeline on Wikipedia that has all the relationships, it's interesting how related everything is.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/RDBMS_ti...

Woah, looks like PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server has same ancestor and started at the same time :)

I remember Ingres but was too stupid to make the connection when Postgres came out. That is awesome.

> too stupid

being a little bit hard on yourself there

And it looks to be working at current pace of PG development Oracle will have only a shrinking high end segment in 10 years.

We used Ingres on HP-UX for our database class when I was at university in the late 90's - and now the vast majority of my current colleagues are quite a lot younger than I am, and they don't know why I keep doing double-takes when they're talking about k8s/nginx ingress...

We ran Ingres on a multi-processor Sequent machine back in 1991 or so. I liked it then and I love Postgres now.

Well done Citus, comendable and inspiring. I’m betting most of my wealth and my new company on Postgres, if it succeeds, I hope to emulate you. Postgres is an incredible data platform, that just gets better and better every year with more functionality AND better performance (unlike most software where more features = slower) AND consistent rock solid reliability AND the best documentation of any product I have seen.

I love Postgres! I've barely scratched the surface compared to you and I found Postgres a pleasure to use when building a solution around it recently, so I'd say even at the basic use/novice end of things it's superior to say SQL Server or (gulp) Oracle, which are the other databases I've had experience of.

I use Python to orchestrate and read SQL scripts from disk which I then write my dynamic variables into, and then pump that into Postgres with psycopg2, and the whole thing's been running perfectly for a couple of years now. Probably a hacky way to do things but it's all offline so I have the luxury of not worrying about security.

can you elaborate more about your company ?

We’re building - a new commerce automation platform - a unified ERP/CRM/CMS.

Hi Odoo guy! I'm a huge fan of your product. It's powering all my startups.

If they had made a cash donation, it would have been an unambiguously good thing.

Equity, however, creates a conflict of interest. If the non-profit Postgres organizations make money when Citus makes money, then they have an incentive to favor Citus over other companies.

Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally? Or if there's a technical decision to be made, and it involves making one company's code incompatible with base Postgres, who do you think will win?

It's a free market, and the parties involved are perfectly free to make this arrangement, but it generates potential problems.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Citus and have options.

> Equity, however, creates a conflict of interest. If the non-profit Postgres organizations make money when Citus makes money, then they have an incentive to favor Citus over other companies. > Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally? Or if there's a technical decision to be made, and it involves making one company's code incompatible with base Postgres, who do you think will win?

Note that none of the non-profits have technical decision making power. That's in the end the decision of the committers (and potentially the core team if there's irreconcilable conflicts). Both groups work for a variety of companies.

> Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally?

Well, maybe the competing company could also become a major donor.

Yes. And then we've created a pay-to-play system. Not good.

What's the difference between that, and companies directly having their employees "donate" FOSS work on a project, where their FOSS contributions consist solely of building features that the company wants the project to have?

As I commented in another post, I don't think this is an actual problem in postgres. But assuming it would be, the difference is that control of central decision making structures allows control over other companies work, whereas having a company's employees contribute doesn't do so to to a significant degree.

This kind of donation could cause the existing in-house manpower to focus on one's company needs, thus decreasing effort for other important work.

By donating actual manpower, efforts that were already there aren't impacted.

Donating new work is different from donating money to affect existing work.

You think Linux is developed by a bunch of guys hacking away in their garage during spare time?

There can be tax benefits when gifting non-cash (things like appreciated stock) to non-profits that benefit the non-profit [1]. I do not know if that is the case here since tax law can be complicated.

[1] https://www.kahnlitwin.com/blogs/tax-blog/is-it-better-to-do...

Cash creates the same conflict of interest. If someone shows up at your door with a "free" wheelbarrow full of cash, you're going to feel like you owe them in return. This could be looking out for their business interests, or as you said, ensuring code compatibility. And, in the back of your mind you might consider that keeping them happy could lead to another wheelbarrow at your door.

It's not the same conflict of interest, but of a different class.

It's all about managing future expectations. Equity implies future profits being predicated on the success of the stock. And so current actions are influenced by future expectations.

A wheelbarrow of Free Cash Today does not imply anything about future expectations, unless you may be expecting another wheelbarrow in the future.

Still, it's common in practice for people to feel like they are indebted to their donors. But should you feel like you owe someone for them giving you something for free? Well, if so, then it wasn't free.

In this case, there's an incentive for the citus competitor to also give postgres some equity. Isn't that a good thing?

They could just sell their 1% and get cash.

Wow, people are quick to suggest this could somehow comprise postgres independence..

I think 1% percent donations like this is fantastic. In this it also seems to make business sense for Citus to ensure postgres is well funded :)

Still a good example to follow.

My ISP.. long ago.. fixed a few key thing in Postgres95 which fixed a few keys things (see slide 19 -- https://www.pgcon.org/2007/schedule/attachments/30-great_ste...).

From that point on, we never had to touch the core again.

The Postgresql community is awesome.

  On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Julian Assange wrote:
  
  > Does anyone know what is happening with the delegation of the
  > postgres domains? Indirect.com was going to hand them over,
  > but as yet has not.

Not a name i was expecting to see! He seems to have made a few commits to psql:

http://mat.caminos.upm.es/~iht/pased2011/

Assange used to be involved in FOSS, even writing and maintaining tools like surfraw[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw

Also has his fingers in NetBSD, though mostly in fortune(1) files, iirc.

https://queue.acm.org/blogposting.cfm?id=27326

Does anyone know what Citus Data is valued at? I'm curious what this is "worth" to the PostgreSQL organizations?

Although, to me it seems more like a gesture than anything else - I am curious.

Apparently others have done this as well:

"Building a Movement of Corporate Philanthropy

We want to change the world through inspiring early–stage corporate philanthropy. Pledge 1% is an easy way to leverage a portion of your future success to support nonprofits in your community. It’s a small commitment today that can make a huge impact tomorrow. The sooner you start, the easier it is–so join your fellow founders by making a pledge today!" [1]

In the list are companies like Atlassian, Salesforce, and Yelp.

The pledge is either 1% of equity, time, product, or profit.

[1] https://pledge1percent.org

This is not philanthropy, this is a company financially supporting the essential foundation upon which their product is built.

Methinks you are confusing altruism with philanthropy/charity.

Either way, it is more than that due to PostgreSQL's software license. Because of that, we all (potentially) benefit.

And it is a commitment. A (somewhat) stable source. More so if more companies commit to such a pledge.

What's the difference?

The investor expects a tangible direct benefit from the investment. A philanthropist expects only the benefit of humanity as a whole, and maybe her own good feelings; or if you are cynical, prestige.

Potentially Citus may be worth a lot, so this is in no way just a symbolic gesture. IMHO it could be the start of something very right happening more often. It was funded for 13M so far btw (crunchbase data).

Their last round was 9.5m, so I'd say their valuation was probably $50m (postmoney) at the time. That was 3 years ago though, so it has likely gone up quite a bit.

I love working with Citus (I'm a customer). Everyone I have interacted with there has been very helpful and supportive. Almost surprisingly so.

This seems right in line with their core values. At least how the company values are practiced since I have no idea if they have "core values" or how they are worded.

Well done!

I can confirm this. I was trying out their product as an option and still they were super helpful (shout out to Sai if you're here) and everyone else too..

Also their slack page is decently active and helpful

Great news! I have a friend that works at Pledge 1%, A company that is based on this idea, I always thought it was a cool concept, maybe doing something like this (or similar) for Open Source would be interesting.

https://pledge1percent.org

congrats to this !

Brewster at Archive.org has been making some persuasive points in public, recently, about non-profit org models, FOSS and sustainable finance models.

Good on them. When done in a transparent and public manner this could be a good thing. One thing to always watch out for is how incentives align.

One possible scenario to think about is if this 1% equity now tilt any sort of balance in the postgresql organization regarding decision making? I.e. if a decision adversely affects Citus but is better for the community.

If the history of the core committee and contributors till now is any indication of their objectivity and community focus, I’m not worried about that in the slightest.

The PostgreSQL community consists of a large number of companies that all contribute large amounts of time and money towards PostgreSQL.

A single donation (even if it's big) is not going to shift the balance in a significant manner.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18296064

This is awesome but it would've been nice to see 10%, something like a tithe for the company's building blocks

Cash (profit share?) would be better no? Equity can't be spent now.

I like the idea of DB as a managed service but in effect this surely means that 3rd party has access to the data?

Are they generous or this is just to avoid Server Side Public License from PostgreSQL ?

What do you mean? How would this have anything to do with changing the license?

Why would a Server Side Public License be needed?