Re: sustainable development

[Sam Mason]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 08:34:58PM -0400, steve paesani wrote:
> I realize this goes against the idea of  free software however I also
> realize that not all things in life are free and developers need to get paid
> at some point for their work.

Maybe you could look at how EnterpriseDB or CommandPrompt operate.
They both base their business models on the Postgres database engine
and there seems to be a nice flow between their developers and
the non-commercial version.  Other companies like Greenplum have
(apparently) just taken the PG code for their own, but it doesn't seem
to have harmed the rest.

PG is BSD licensed which makes this different to Hurd, but it would
be interesting to see what you could do!  It seems important that the
main non-commercial version isn't under control of the commercial side
(i.e. Tom Lane at RedHat is probably the principle developer of PG at
the moment) but once you build up the right sort of community I'm not
sure how much it matters.

The commercial side needs to focus on the things the business users
perceive they need; support and compatibility seem to be the big ones.
The non-commercial side is much less well defined, but is normally
maintained by people who have an interest in technical things so you
should get a good flow of ideas about where to push from the commercial
side.

-- 
  Sam  http://samason.me.uk/