[fleetside72]

The relationship between EnterpriseDB and the at-large Postgres community has always intrigued me. Why do they turn over to the community what they could make part of their proprietary fork? Maybe they make a lot of money consulting and not just licenses and general at-large adoption is good for that side of business.

[Tostino]

Part of it is that they build the basis for features, and work on getting them into core, so it makes their value added features in their proprietary fork easier to maintain. Sometimes giving back and having an easier time maintaining your own fork is worth the effort and costs associated I guess. I for one appreciate it.

[mulmen]

I have never used EnterpriseDB and I am only aware of it from a distance but it has always struck me as the ideal open source arrangement. Sure, EnterpriseDB is never going to have the revenue numbers of Oracle but their management and business teams should have a much easier time sleeping at night. I think it is great that EnterpriseDB has identified that it is better for their company to exist as part of a healthy ecosystem instead of trying to pave paradise so to speak.

[b34r]

A healthy relationship with open source projects is a great way to attract talent and gain goodwill.

[manigandham]

> but their management and business teams should have a much easier time sleeping at night

Why? What is Oracle doing so wrong that they cant sleep as well at night?

[pstuart]

I think their secret sauce is Oracle compatibility, so if Postgres runs better, they run better.

[koolba]

And the Oracle compatibility piece breaks so much that it would never get merged into community Postgres.

[pstuart]

Even if it didn't, for all the work they put into the community version one can't begrudge them trying to make a living on the enterprise side.

[jeltz]

There are also plenty of devs in the community, outside the EnterpriseDB employees, who do do not want to pollute core PostgreSQL with alternative ways to do things it already can do just because of Oracle compatibility. Aliases have been added for ISO SQL compatibility, but adding features purely (i.e. features with zero value unless you are migrating from Oracle) for Oracle compatibility is not something core PostgreSQL does.

[rodgerd]

Well, Red Hat have demonstrated you can make a lot of money by open sourcing things (including buying proprietary software like ManageIQ and oVirt and open sourcing it). Given that EDB has ex-RHAT folks involved in setting it up, I imagine they're trying to replay the model.

[fleetside72]

I don't see how Red Hat has open sourced anything, the direction they are taking things is proprietary, not open.

[hendzen]

RedHat Q4 FY2016 profit: $68M

Oracle Q4 FY2016 profit: $2B

[awj]

You do realize you're comparing an amalgamation of software companies to a Linux distribution vendor, right? Oracle hasn't just been a database company for ... probably decades.

[bsg75]

Apples : Citrus

[zzzzzzzza]

will oracle be around in 10-20 years? will red hat? which will experience growth?

[temp246810]

All things being equal it would take red hat ~30 quarters to make 2bn dollars, or roughly 7 years.

7 years to make what Oracle makes in a quarter.

I don't really have a dog in this fight but just FYI I think you missed ops point.

[john61]

RedHat contributes to the common good, Oracle for a few millionaires. Therefore they create more value.

[hendzen]

Does developing MySQL and Java somehow not contribute to the common good?

[zzzzzzzza]

I thought we didn't care about cash flows when valuing tech companies, just growth prospects ;)

[manigandham]

This is a very common model now - several companies have open-source software (either their own or major contributor to) that is then covered with extra functionality, support and consulting services.

Some tradeoffs since the products are usually not as good and move slower than proprietary commercial offerings but the free access and large communities make up for it.

[takeda]

They do, they for example provide fork of Postgres that is compatible with Oracle which is not free.

[X86BSD]

Can't be for certain but one possible large factor is it reduces diffs from the upstream if you commit as much as you can back upstream. It's a major engineering drag to deal with that.