Hi!
There has been a lot recently brought up about vendor interaction with
the project, and I wanted to add a few thoughts.
My personal take is that seeing vendors show up and offer support/
hardware/services is a good thing. It is a sign of both the growth and
health of the project.
The thing about growth is that it is not always comfortable and there
can be more the a few sore points that happen along the way.
Personally? I'd like to find a way to have as much of this smoothed
over as possible.
No one should be penalized for their efforts. There are a lot of hours
spent on memcached per week, hundreds of when you consider bug
testing, code, promotion, etc... all of this has value. There is no
one entity for this project, it is pretty mutli-company/person (which
I personally think adds to the value of it).
All of the growth in the project should be to the benefit of everyone.
This really is a "all boats rise in water".
So how do we get everyone participating in a manner that achieves the
end goal, which is the promotion, adoption, spread of Memcached?
Let me throw out some material to read:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/AdvocacyGuides
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BoothCheckList
Postgres has a long history of being "many vendor" and when I look
around I see them as one community we can learn from. I suspect there
are others as well but having a common license and a common
distributed identity I am wondering whether we could follow their
model (or better improve on it).
So what should be the plan? How do we encourage people and at the same
time set a level of what is appropriate for the community at large?
On the same token, we really need to realize and accept that people
feed their families from the use of memcached, and we shouldn't be
creating barriers which harms this.
Cheers,
-Brian
