On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:40 PM, John Adams <john_adams_mail@yahoo.com> wrote:
> If you guys care about money and time why would you spend the best years of
> your life basically copying commercial products for free?
I don't work for free. :-)
There was a point at which this was just a hobby for me, but as it has
since turned into a job, it's hard for me to say that the time I spent
on it had no economic value. But it is also true that it was a great
hobby. Working on PostgreSQL gave me an opportunity to work with some
absolutely brilliant programmers, which is not something I've
frequently gotten a chance to do in the course of my previous
employment. And it's also fun to feel like you're contributing
something back to a project that you've gotten so much out of.
With respect to copying commerical products, we may be doing that to
some extent, but it's not because we're sitting around going "oh, so
what has Oracle done lately?". We tend to think about what PostgreSQL
needs and work on that. Sometimes there's overlap, other times not.
> Because for a
> person with higher than average IQ far less than one percent of any program
> is creative and needs some thinking and the bulk of it is just a million
> stupid details.
I haven't written a program that matched this expectation since I was
in high school. And I think that was only because I wasn't as good a
programmer then as I thought I was. My experience is that most
programming requires a lot of careful thought and good design, and
that doing this well is not easy. This is doubly true for a large,
complex, and mature project like PostgreSQL, where changes need to be
exceedingly carefully thought out.
> I just don't follow/understand your thinking. Maybe I am naïve.
>
> I do not have experience with open source and I kind of thought open source
> guys do not need or care about money and time.
I try not to make money the center of my life, but I like to get paid
as much as the next guy. Many of the regulars here derive a
substantial portion of their income from PostgreSQL-related work of
one kind or another. Even when my PostgreSQL development was a hobby,
a big part of my job revolved around developing FOR PostgreSQL.
Filing down some of the rough edges I encountered during that
development was one of the things that drew me to the project (the
other being the aforementioned really smart people).
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company