Working it out

There's was recently a fairly heated discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy mailing list. Generally, I don't feel that I've got anything useful to contribute to such discussions and tend to stay out of them, but for some reason, I decided to make a few comments regarding this one.

I didn't really have too much to contribute, just a few thoughts. But this guy apparently needs to switch to decaf.

He goes on and on, and (quite frankly) I don't even follow as to what his point is overall, except that he simply seems to be grumpy.

The part that irritates me is that he took a quote from a message I posted and presented it out of context. The email the quote was taken from is here.

Mr LewisC turns my comment into some sort of argument. He can't even seem to figure out what my name is.

"Bah"?

When I posted that email, Andrew Sullivan responded that he didn't agree with the "doing good for the world" comment. I let it slide without reply because (frankly) it's an opinion and everyone is entitled to theirs. Now that The Fabulous LewisC has found it necessary to extract my words and argue with them, without even an explanation for his stand, I feel the need to reply publicly.

When a company decides to become a member of the open source community, they make that decision for any number of reasons. They may feel that it's a superior business mode, for example. Or they may feel that it will cut costs. It's possible that they may feel that open source software is the ultimate enlightened community, and they want to support that with a commercial venture (much like Kern is planning to do with Bacula)

Whatever the reason, when a company actually becomes part of the open source community, they agree to certain behaviors.

Now, I'm not talking about just any company that takes open source software and tries to make money off it. I'm talking about companies like EnterpriseDB and Command Prompt that give money, code, time, and beer back to the open source project that they're taking from.

And when they make that decision, the agree to behave in a manner that will benefit the open source community as well as themselves. This isn't a written contract, it's something much more powerful, it's an implied agreement with the community. Written contracts are always subject to lawyer's review and scrutiny, and the signers of such contracts are always carefully investigating what they can get away with. With an implied agreement, like the ones EDB and CMD have made with the PostgreSQL community, the bonds are different. It's about keeping friendships and shared goals, not how I can get one up on the other guy.

Apparently, this smells like "cow dung" to LewisC. Well, if that's what Lewis needs to say to generate enough sensationalism to get people to read his blog, that's fine by me.

But if you're going to quote me, then refute my stand, have the common courtesy to use my name (instead of calling me "someone") and give some facts.

How about these facts, Lewis: Both EnterpriseDB and Command Prompt agreed to adjust their marketing language based on the discussion.

Perhaps that's what LewisC is unable to understand. The fact that it's possible for companies and the PostgreSQL community to discuss issues in public and improve how they do business is probably a foreign concept to him.

I'm confused by LewisC's comments. He claims to be knowledgeable in the ways of database systems and the like, then he says things so utterly stupid as to be childish. For example, he claims that "your own brand/religion of software licensing does not give you moral superiority over anyone else", which is the most outlandish claim I can imagine. Of course it does. If I create a licensing scheme that locks customers in and charges them unreasonably high prices, I'm morally inferior to anyone who licenses their product in a way that provides a customer with fair pricing and choices.

In the end, it simply irritates me that he quoted me as part of his nonsensical rant. I guess that's just the way the Internet works.