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/
