On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 02:57:38PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> >3) do add-ins count if they are completely externally hosted?
>
> I don't think so ... even stuff hosted on pgfoundry shouldn't really be
> included, IMHO ...
That position strikes me as self-defeating. We've been aggressively
pushing things out of the main tree and onto gborg/pgfoundry on the
grounds that they're not "core" things, even though they make the
system complete (analogous to the GNU part of GNU/Linux, if you
believe in that little bit of flamebait). If we now say, "Since it's
not really part of the core, we won't acknowledge it," we concede the
very point that MySQL fanboys, Ellison partisans, &c. are always
saying: PostgreSQL doesn't _really_ have replication, because it's
some unassociated add-on; PostgreSQL doesn't _really_ have R or Perl
or Java support, because it's an external, unassociated add-on.
Indeed, such people will say that PostgreSQL isn't really a database
_system_, but just a kernel. They'll be right.
I'm with Josh: we have plenty of scroll space, and I think we want to
make this tent as big as possible. In fact, I'm even inclined to
include closed software as a kind of contribution, although as a
lesser one. By way of analogy, I think it makes a very big
contribution to Linux that Oracle will run on it; it's not the same
thing as paying for Alan Cox, but it's still a significant
participation in the community of users.
A
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