Who pays the piper?

Tuesday, February 8. 2011

I was wondering idly today about who pays for community work on PostgreSQL. In particular, who pays for work done reviewing and committing other people's work. I know Bruce, Heikki and Robert are employed by EnterpriseDB, Tom by RedHat and Alvarro by CommandPrompt, and I assume at least some of the time they spend working on this is funded by their employers. I don't know about others, I guess they can speak for themselves. I don't receive any direct funding for Postgres community work. I have in the past received sponsorship for specific features, such as parallel pg_restore and extensible enums, but that doesn't cover time spent on day to day work, or even quite large items such as last year's plperl security fixes, which consumed a huge amount of time.

It could be argued that this is a cost of doing business. I earn my daily bread by working with Postgres, and most or all of my customers come through that connection. That includes PostgreSQL Experts Inc clients. But I could probably drop all or almost all my unpaid community work and not suffer a serious decline in business. I'm not going to, but I wouldn't suffer a lot professionally if I did.

I don't have any grand conclusions out of this. But thoughts like this do come to me every commitfest, when I feel I should be doing more. I will probably pick up three or four more items from the commitfest queue during the next week. But how much I do will be governed by how much time I can snatch from other, paying, activities.

Posted by Andrew Dunstan in PGExperts, PostgreSQL at 18:25 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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As you earn a salary from PostgreSQL Experts Inc and you work on postgres community projects, how is that different than Heikki earning a salar from EnterpriseDB and working on postgres stuff? 
 
I think the question is sincere and a good one, but I don't understand why you see PostgreSQL Experts in a different light than the other companies you mentioned.

#1 Theo Schlossnagle (Homepage) on 2011-02-08 19:15 (Reply)

The only salary I earn from PostgreSQL Experts Inc is specifically for working on its clients' projects. We don't currently have a budget for significant community work, and the company isn't really set up that way - I sometimes think of it more as a consultants' cooperative. Maybe if our business were ten times larger we'd be able to afford it. 
 
In fact, most of my income comes from legacy clients, not from PostgreSQL Experts Inc. So you might more reasonably ask that question w.r.t. Dunslane Consulting LLC. 
 
An indeed, I more or less said as much anyway, when talking about this being a cost of doing business. 
 
I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. I hope you didn't get the impression I was.

#1.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2011-02-08 19:49 (Reply)

"Salary"...that's a good one. OmniTI doesn't work like most smaller consulting companies. 
 
Before my last job change, community work used to be funded by me, on the theory that a growing PostgreSQL market would eventually lead to more work. Nowadays various business around 2ndQuadrant helps support my community stuff, but it doesn't pay for all of it. Like yourself I also could do significantly more billable work if I cut back on PostgreSQL volunteering. Managing a CommitFest is a solid week plus of lost time that bills to nobody for example.

#1.2 Greg Smith (Homepage) on 2011-02-08 22:26 (Reply)

@Andrew, @Greg, 
 
It is this selfless (sort of) work done by you guys and many others that has made Postgres what it is today. Kudos. 
 
I say 'sort of selfless' because, as noted by Greg, I think it pays back in terms of visibility in market, it lets you steer and stay on top of the latest developments, and ultimately growing Postgres market drives more business to you. 
 
And did I forget to mention personal satisfaction? I know that's why I love Postgres.

#2 Gurjeet Singh on 2011-02-09 02:09 (Reply)

For what it's worth, Red Hat pays me to do this stuff. I'm far from the only Red Hat employee who spends the bulk of his time on "upstream project" work, either --- see kernel and gcc hackers for instance. Ultimately that money comes from people who pay for RHEL subscriptions. Part of the value proposition of RHEL is that open source software in general gets better. Just sayin'.

#3 Tom Lane on 2011-02-09 02:28 (Reply)

Oh, I'm a big fan of RedHat, and have been since I installed RH4.2 (which I still have the disk for) on the first machine I got when I moved to the USA, the same machine that was later used to develop the initial C version of initdb, and the first versions of the buildfarm. The fact that they employ you, Tom, as well as a bunch of other outstanding hackers on key bits of FOSS is greatly to their credit. I happily encourage corporate clients to use RHEL - it's my server distro of choice for this as well as other reasons, and I'm happy to say so. 
 
I guess part of the point of my musing was that it's harder for little people like me than it is for larger corporate concerns like, say, RedHat to make lots of time available when the project might need it for something like closing out a release. I always feel bad that I can't so more at crunch times like when we're trying to finish a commitfest, but I do as much as I can.

#3.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2011-02-09 02:53 (Reply)

Andrew, 
 
Good points. As far as PostGIS/PostgreSQL goes, I feel the same way too and we are a small company so its sometimes hard to justify when money is easier to quantify. I'm happy that I have free time I can devote. I know others are not as lucky. 
 
I know its not cool to say it, but I do it for the most part because I enjoy doing it so to me its the difference between paying to go to the amusement park which I hate or doing what I like. 
 
I also see it as a sales thing (including our blogs) which while harder to put a price on -- you could say if I were to spend x amount on ads vs. x amount on blogging which would I do and which would produce the most business. 
 
So in a sense I put a value on everything including my enjoyment of things and relief of stress. 
 
e.g. I could spend x hours getting paid x dollars for a very stressful and not very interesting project. 
or I could spend x hours getting paid 0 dollars for something that may produce (10*x dollars of sales revenue) and (20*x dollars of just gratification). 
 
So I guess the point is that there are many ways to measure value that don't directly translate to money but really in the end money is just a convenient way of measuring utility and as one of my favorite economists John Forbes Nash once said money may be reaching its point of extinction since it doesn't quite serve the purpose it once did.

#4 Regina (Homepage) on 2011-02-09 17:08 (Reply)

A Wall Street Hedge Fund guy (large income, stress ulcer) once asked me what I got from working on Postgres, and looked more than puzzled when I told him "good karma." There's certainly what the economists like to call a psychic benefit.

#4.1 Andrew Dunstan on 2011-02-09 17:19 (Reply)

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