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.