Red Hat to support PostgreSQL

--- Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> wrote:

Here is a press release stating Red Hat will offer commercial
support
for PostgreSQL:

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_database.html

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

Brent

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What they'll probably do is write a fancy-schmancy installer and call it
"The Redhat Database", since that's been business plan with other all
"their" other software..... Just kidding RH guys *grin*...

Since the same people who backed (and are backing?) Redhat started and
own Greatbridge, I'm not at all surprised to see RH start to openly support
PostgreSQL.. All good for PostgreSQL in the end, I think...

-Mitch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent R. Matzelle" <bmatzelle@yahoo.com>
To: "PostgreSQL-general" <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Red Hat to support PostgreSQL

"Brent R. Matzelle" <bmatzelle@yahoo.com> writes:

--- Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> wrote:

Here is a press release stating Red Hat will offer commercial
support
for PostgreSQL:

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_database.html

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

Yes, we will/are working on enhancements for PostgreSQL.

--
Trond Eivind Glomsr�d
Red Hat, Inc.

--- Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> wrote:

Here is a press release stating Red Hat will offer commercial
support
for PostgreSQL:

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_database.html

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
announce something here today.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:

--- Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> wrote:

Here is a press release stating Red Hat will offer commercial
support
for PostgreSQL:

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_database.html

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
announce something here today.

Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative said that there is not such intention but given that "verba volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

It would really spoil my day to have GM'ed Postgresqls running around. I can barely keep up with one, let alone two ;-)

cheers,
thalis

Hi all,

My thought on this is that Red Hat will do the following :

a) Gain entry into a profitable, growing market segment with their
product
b) Enhance PostgreSQL's profile through their work
c) Assist in more people developing with and for PostgreSQL, both
through Red Hat's people and through others adding support for "Red Hat
Database" to their products
c.a) More bugs fixed
c.b) More features added
c.c) Further improved documentation
c.d) Improve the present database design, management and development
tools. Sybase, Oracle, Informix benefit from them. We will too.

At some point they'll probably provide some direction into the
PostgreSQL effort too. Nothing wrong with this as long as it's to the
benefit of PostgreSQL users (not just "Red Hat Database" users) and
generally acceptable. I think their input should be encouraged, just
not taken verbatim.

So, I reckon it's a great thing to have more people involved with
PostgreSQL. The PostgreSQL community is strong, and should not be
scared of this. :-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" wrote:

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
announce something here today.

Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

Well, I don't know Red Hat has done forking in any other open source
project, so I don't see why it would happen here.

Yes, technically, they can fork it, but so can anyone else. The BSD
license concept is that a company could not possibly duplicate the
effectiveness of the open source community, so why would any company
try.

It would really spoil my day to have GM'ed Postgresqls running
around. I can barely keep up with one, let alone two ;-)

That is exactly it. No one could keep up with us in a forked branch of
our code, and if they could, we would not be doing our jobs and maybe
the fork would be a good thing.

The biggest fork I can remember was from Jolitz's 386/BSD project.
Jolitz was clearly keeping it all to himself and not doing anything to
advance the code. The NetBSD fork was clearly a good thing.

I am not saying anything about PostgreSQL forking. What I am saying is
that as long as we are healthy, no one can fork effectively, and this is
true of all open-source projects.

In fact, we have advanced so quickly in comparison to other open-source
databases _because_ we are so healthy. If we ever get closed-minded,
insulting, non-inclusive, or rude, you guys better kick us in the butts.

--
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Is RedHat simply providing PostgreSQL support or are they
placing developers to work on enhancements/bug fixes as well?

They are placing developers too. New people. I assume they will
announce something here today.

Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

Well, I don't know Red Hat has done forking in any other open source
project, so I don't see why it would happen here.

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my "fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the DB arena. Hopefully, even if things don't turn out exactly as expected, they will have benefited Pg a lot by then.

That is exactly it. No one could keep up with us in a forked branch of
our code, and if they could, we would not be doing our jobs and maybe
the fork would be a good thing.

I fear not the technical part...I fear the marketing part. This is were battles are won today (sad but true).

In fact, we have advanced so quickly in comparison to other open-source
databases _because_ we are so healthy. If we ever get closed-minded,
insulting, non-inclusive, or rude, you guys better kick us in the butts.

Hopefully I won't have to look for my spiked shoes anytime soon >-)

Just to lighten up here, I read the following in an article:

'Three months ago, IBM rented a billboard near Oracle's Silicon Valley headquarters declaring a "search for intelligent software," only to find, a few days later, that an Oracle billboard reporting "Then you've come to the right place. Oracle," had been put up.'

cheers,
thalis

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the
pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my
"fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open
source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real
money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the
DB arena.

Uh? The database project is small FTTB (moneywise) compared to other
things like the kernel, gcc and glibc which are core parts of our base
product.

--
Trond Eivind Glomsr�d
Red Hat, Inc.

On 25 Jun 2001, Trond Eivind [iso-8859-1] Glomsr���d wrote:

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the
pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my
"fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open
source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real
money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the
DB arena.

Uh? The database project is small FTTB (moneywise) compared to other
things like the kernel, gcc and glibc which are core parts of our base
product.

--
Trond Eivind Glomsr���d
Red Hat, Inc.

But kernel/gcc/glibc don't comprise a market by themselves. They are just components of the OS market as a whole (if there is any such thing left anyway). Whereas PostgreSQL is one product part of one market, the DBMS market. So forking off just this one thing will mean stepping in for a market's share which is indeed big $$$. This couldn't be the case with gnome or gcc.
I'm not comparing sizes. Just strategic importance :^)

--thalis

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

On 25 Jun 2001, Trond Eivind Glomsr�d wrote:

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the
pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my
"fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open
source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real
money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the
DB arena.

Uh? The database project is small FTTB (moneywise) compared to other
things like the kernel, gcc and glibc which are core parts of our base
product.

But kernel/gcc/glibc don't comprise a market by themselves.

But you called them "not major" and something we couldn't make money
from. We make quite a bit of money on gcc, to give one example -
through contracts to add features, support for architectures, support
etc. We are the number one company in that area (remember, Cygnus is
now part of Red Hat).

They are just components of the OS market as a whole (if there is any such
thing left anyway).

But the core on which the rest is built.

--
Trond Eivind Glomsr�d
Red Hat, Inc.

On 25 Jun 2001, Trond Eivind [iso-8859-1] Glomsr���d wrote:

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

On 25 Jun 2001, Trond Eivind Glomsr���d wrote:

"Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos" <thalis@cs.pitt.edu> writes:

Always a first time for everything bad. Anyway, not wanting to be the
pessimist of the bunch, I'll hold my horses and hope that none of my
"fears" turns into reality. The issue is that none of the other open
source projects RH supported was anything major they could make real
money out of, at least not compared to what they can make out of the
DB arena.

Uh? The database project is small FTTB (moneywise) compared to other
things like the kernel, gcc and glibc which are core parts of our base
product.

But kernel/gcc/glibc don't comprise a market by themselves.

But you called them "not major" and something we couldn't make money
from. We make quite a bit of money on gcc, to give one example -
through contracts to add features, support for architectures, support
etc. We are the number one company in that area (remember, Cygnus is
now part of Red Hat).

They are just components of the OS market as a whole (if there is any such
thing left anyway).

But the core on which the rest is built.

I may use a ladder to gather cashew nuts of a tree. They are expensive. That doesn't necessarily mean that ladders are expensive although this may bring some value to their market :o)

cheers,
thalis

Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

It would really spoil my day to have GM'ed Postgresqls running
around. I can barely keep up with one, let alone two ;-)

Well, if they fork then we can probably assume Redhat's database will be as
bad as their OS, so there's nothing to worry about ;-) *chuckle*

- Andrew

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Andrew Snow wrote:

Yes, but are they going to be collaborating closely with the
current Pg core devel team or are they going to work on their
own? The concern is regarding the Cnet article about "Redhat
forking off eventually with their own pg". Their representative
said that there is not such intention but given that "verba
volant, scripta manent", what are the guarantees against that?

It would really spoil my day to have GM'ed Postgresqls running
around. I can barely keep up with one, let alone two ;-)

Well, if they fork then we can probably assume Redhat's database will be as
bad as their OS, so there's nothing to worry about ;-) *chuckle*

That's not true. If you started off with Ygdrassil linux then probably Rh seems too "soft", but they are the ones who brought the crowds closer. And although technical expertise may be desired from "the followers", it is the numbers that make the difference and the people vote for u.s.e.r.f.r.i.e.n.d.l.y. I don't think Volkerding for example would be even remotely interested in doing market research ;-) Besides Rh does more than just bundle a linux distribution together.
Anyway, there are Rh members on the list. They know better what Rh has contributed (probably more than we know of)

cheers,
thalis

Thalis A. Kalfigopoulos wrote:

Well, if they fork then we can probably assume Redhat's database will be as
bad as their OS, so there's nothing to worry about ;-) *chuckle*

That's not true. If you started off with Ygdrassil linux then probably Rh seems too "soft", but they are the ones who brought the crowds closer. And although technical expertise may be desired from "the followers", it is the numbers that make the difference and the people vote for u.s.e.r.f.r.i.e.n.d.l.y. I don't think Volkerding for example would be even remotely interested in doing market research ;-) Besides Rh does more than just bundle a linux distribution together.
Anyway, there are Rh members on the list. They know better what Rh has contributed (probably more than we know of)

In 1997 I bought a 6 CD set from Info Magic. RedHat was on disk one. I
installed it because it was on disk one... I had a machine running Suse
for a while because of ISDN support. I have installed various other
distribs in a VMware machine to test them.

There is nothing very wrong with RedHat. For a server it needs to be
hardened a little, but that is no big deal.

On the Power tools disk in that set there was Postgresql. Having read
the then non free licence of mySql I installed Postgresql.

Yes things really are that simple out here in user land.

Cheers

Tony Grant

--
RedHat Linux on Sony Vaio C1XD/S
http://www.animaproductions.com/linux2.html
Macromedia UltraDev with PostgreSQL
http://www.animaproductions.com/ultra.html

Quoting Tony Grant (tony@animaproductions.com):

In 1997 I bought a 6 CD set from Info Magic. RedHat was on disk one. I
installed it because it was on disk one... I had a machine running Suse

In 1996-97, I had just been through the horror of upgrading a lab full of
machines from SLS 1.03 to Slackware, and then from one Slackware version
to another. Each "upgrade" was a re-install and reconfigure. Along came
RedHat with the promise of doing real upgrades without losing all your
configuration. Of course I jumped at the chance. I've been using RedHat
ever since, even though they had a couple of major changes in rpm that
made it impossible to do a real upgrade.

In 2000, I had an PHP application written using MySQL, and I suddenly
decided I wanted to be able to have it work better with simultaneous
updates, and I'd read that Postgresql was no longer dog slow compared to
MySQL, so I switched to PostgresSQL.

--
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin@xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
"What we perceive as `God' is simply a by-product of our search for God."
- G'Kar.

Quoting Paul Tomblin (ptomblin@xcski.com):

In 1996-97, I had just been through the horror of upgrading a lab full of

Sorry, that was 1991-92. What was I thinking?

machines from SLS 1.03 to Slackware, and then from one Slackware version

--
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin@xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
"How do you feel about women's rights?"
"I like either side of them."
-- Groucho Marx, 1890-1977

At 07:00 PM 27-06-2001 -0400, Trond Eivind Glomsr�d wrote:

"Steve Wolfe" <steve@iboats.com> writes:

Previous to version 7.1, RHL wasn't very secure by default. This is one

of

the most common complaints I hear. 7.1 can be made quite secure out of

the

box without any special config -- just leave the firewall config at the
default of 'HIGH' -- of course, I've now heard complaints that it is then
'too secure' :-).

Myself, I'd prefer that they'd just leave the insecure services off by
default, rather than using a firewall as a "band-aid". ; )

ALmost all services are off as well. Openssh is on, sendmail is on
(but only accepts connects from the local machine), portmap is on and
that's about it.

Why openssh, portmap and sendmail?

I'm not familiar with RH7 and later, but the older redhat's distros had way
too much on by default. I have to keep turning off inetd.

Still I use RH coz I can't be bothered to keep tweaking my kernel for
development servers (I still tweak for the firewall). The max process/users
and other similar default settings from www.linux.org just don't cut it.

Cheerio,
Link.

"BM" == Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:

BM> Here is a press release stating Red Hat will offer commercial support
BM> for PostgreSQL:

BM> http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_database.html

My read is that they're supporting their integrated OS+DB package, not
PostgreSQL directly. This is not the same in my book, since I don't
care to run RHL in any kind of production environment.

--
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Vivek Khera, Ph.D. Khera Communications, Inc.
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