[_jal]

Absolutely agreed.

A friend of mine was doing an MBA and was planning a paper on open source collaboration models. She asked me for my opinion on well-run projects and Postgres was the first thing that crossed my mind.

They have an excellent combination of goals, structure and expertise, and have created a remarkably low-drama, functional community around delivering excellent tools. I really think there's a lot to emulate there.

[wmu]

My short story regarding community. A few years ago I wanted to add a feature to PL/pgSQL that was on their TODO list. I asked about the feature on a public list and while I was unknown to the community I immediately got a private email from a developer who contributed to that part of code. We discussed the required changes and I prepared a patch. He reviewed it and later was supporting during formal review.