Comment by arp242

Comment by arp242 3 days ago

2 replies

Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.

But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.

With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.

I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.

blackenedgem 3 days ago

With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.

There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.

  • arp242 3 days ago

    No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.