“There are four things that motivate open source development teams:
1. The challenge/puzzle of programming, 2. Need for the software, 3. Personal advancement, 4. Belief in open source” — Bruce Momjian.

On PostgreSQL and the challenges of motivating and managing open source teams, I have interviewed Bruce Momjian, Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB, and Co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and Core Contributor.

RVZ

Q1. How did you manage to transform PostgreSQL from an abandoned academic project into a commercially viable, now enterprise relational database?

Bruce Momjian: Ever since I was a developer of database …

Bruce Momjian says

…the volume of patches [to PostgreSQL] has risen dramatically during the past few years.

This is total hearsay — I don’t have hard numbers, haven’t verified it myself, etc etc. But consider the source!

What can be responsible for this increase in patches to PostgreSQL?

Bruce Momjian, Open Source development, patches, PostgreSQL

As a I wrote a couple of days ago, I went to the second day of PostgreSQL Conference East 2008 last Sunday. I had a good time and really enjoyed meeting everyone, listening, learning, and occasionally talking. I asked a number of fearless-newbie questions that paid off handsomely: people were very willing to humor me. I also left with a beautiful t-shirt, mug, and bag combo thanks to EnterpriseDB. The bag has already been put to use for a grocery shopping trip.

Note to conference/website organizers: I can’t link to anything but the front page, so I assume my link above will someday point to the 2009 conference, or the 2008 West conference. It would be good to give each event a permalink right from the start…

One thing that surprised me was the distance …