
Citus Data Donates 1% of Equity to PostgreSQL Organizations - mitchbob
https://www.citusdata.com/newsroom/press/citus-data-donates-1-percent-equity-to-non-profit-postgresql-organizations/
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Bucephalus355
Fun fact: Ingres was the brainchild of the brilliant Professor Michael
Stonebraker. After the company went under after being beaten by Oracle in the
RDBMS marketplace, he open-sourced the DB as a shot against Larry Ellison.
Hence it’s name, “Post-Ingres”, or Postgres.

Also, I believe his version of SQL was called QUEL, and we would have been
using that term today had Ingres won out.

~~~
sitharus
There's a timeline on Wikipedia that has all the relationships, it's
interesting how related everything is.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/RDBMS_ti...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/RDBMS_timeline.svg)

~~~
jve
Woah, looks like PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server has same ancestor and started at
the same time :)

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garyclarke27
Well done Citus, comendable and inspiring. I’m betting most of my wealth and
my new company on Postgres, if it succeeds, I hope to emulate you. Postgres is
an incredible data platform, that just gets better and better every year with
more functionality AND better performance (unlike most software where more
features = slower) AND consistent rock solid reliability AND the best
documentation of any product I have seen.

~~~
unclefoo
can you elaborate more about your company ?

~~~
garyclarke27
We’re building - a new commerce automation platform - a unified ERP/CRM/CMS.

~~~
unixhero
Hi Odoo guy! I'm a huge fan of your product. It's powering all my startups.

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ccleve
If they had made a cash donation, it would have been an unambiguously good
thing.

Equity, however, creates a conflict of interest. If the non-profit Postgres
organizations make money when Citus makes money, then they have an incentive
to favor Citus over other companies.

Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a
bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations equally?
Or if there's a technical decision to be made, and it involves making one
company's code incompatible with base Postgres, who do you think will win?

It's a free market, and the parties involved are perfectly free to make this
arrangement, but it generates potential problems.

~~~
hamandcheese
> Let's say there's a Citus competitor. The competitor implements a feature a
> bit differently than Citus. Does Postgres support both organizations
> equally?

Well, maybe the competing company could also become a major donor.

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ccleve
Yes. And then we've created a pay-to-play system. Not good.

~~~
derefr
What's the difference between that, and companies directly having their
employees "donate" FOSS work on a project, where their FOSS contributions
consist solely of building features that the company wants the project to
have?

~~~
anarazel
As I commented in another post, I don't think this is an actual problem in
postgres. But assuming it would be, the difference is that control of central
decision making structures allows control over _other companies_ work, whereas
having a company's employees contribute doesn't do so to to a significant
degree.

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jopsen
Wow, people are quick to suggest this could somehow comprise postgres
independence..

I think 1% percent donations like this is fantastic. In this it also seems to
make business sense for Citus to ensure postgres is well funded :)

Still a good example to follow.

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cowmix
My ISP.. long ago.. fixed a few key thing in Postgres95 which fixed a few keys
things (see slide 19 --
[https://www.pgcon.org/2007/schedule/attachments/30-great_ste...](https://www.pgcon.org/2007/schedule/attachments/30-great_steps.pdf)).

From that point on, we never had to touch the core again.

The Postgresql community is awesome.

~~~
twic

      On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Julian Assange wrote:
      
      > Does anyone know what is happening with the delegation of the
      > postgres domains? Indirect.com was going to hand them over,
      > but as yet has not.
    

Not a name i was expecting to see! He seems to have made a few commits to
psql:

[http://mat.caminos.upm.es/~iht/pased2011/](http://mat.caminos.upm.es/~iht/pased2011/)

~~~
rrix2
Assange used to be involved in FOSS, even writing and maintaining tools like
surfraw[1]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw)

~~~
bch
Also has his fingers in NetBSD, though mostly in fortune(1) files, iirc.

[https://queue.acm.org/blogposting.cfm?id=27326](https://queue.acm.org/blogposting.cfm?id=27326)

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citilife
Does anyone know what Citus Data is valued at? I'm curious what this is
"worth" to the PostgreSQL organizations?

Although, to me it seems more like a gesture than anything else - I am
curious.

~~~
Fnoord
Apparently others have done this as well:

"Building a Movement of Corporate Philanthropy

We want to change the world through inspiring early–stage corporate
philanthropy. Pledge 1% is an easy way to leverage a portion of your future
success to support nonprofits in your community. It’s a small commitment today
that can make a huge impact tomorrow. The sooner you start, the easier it
is–so join your fellow founders by making a pledge today!" [1]

In the list are companies like Atlassian, Salesforce, and Yelp.

The pledge is either 1% of equity, time, product, or profit.

[1] [https://pledge1percent.org](https://pledge1percent.org)

~~~
the_duke
This is not philanthropy, this is a company financially supporting the
essential foundation upon which their product is built.

~~~
dymk
What's the difference?

~~~
singlow
The investor expects a tangible direct benefit from the investment. A
philanthropist expects only the benefit of humanity as a whole, and maybe her
own good feelings; or if you are cynical, prestige.

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jaxn
I love working with Citus (I'm a customer). Everyone I have interacted with
there has been very helpful and supportive. Almost surprisingly so.

This seems right in line with their core values. At least how the company
values are practiced since I have no idea if they have "core values" or how
they are worded.

Well done!

~~~
iKevinShah
I can confirm this. I was trying out their product as an option and still they
were super helpful (shout out to Sai if you're here) and everyone else too..

Also their slack page is decently active and helpful

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sbr464
Great news! I have a friend that works at Pledge 1%, A company that is based
on this idea, I always thought it was a cool concept, maybe doing something
like this (or similar) for Open Source would be interesting.

[https://pledge1percent.org](https://pledge1percent.org)

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mistrial9
congrats to this !

Brewster at Archive.org has been making some persuasive points in public,
recently, about non-profit org models, FOSS and sustainable finance models.

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jtchang
Good on them. When done in a transparent and public manner this could be a
good thing. One thing to always watch out for is how incentives align.

One possible scenario to think about is if this 1% equity now tilt any sort of
balance in the postgresql organization regarding decision making? I.e. if a
decision adversely affects Citus but is better for the community.

~~~
koolba
If the history of the core committee and contributors till now is any
indication of their objectivity and community focus, I’m not worried about
that in the slightest.

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tr33house
This is awesome but it would've been nice to see 10%, something like a tithe
for the company's building blocks

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quickthrower2
Cash (profit share?) would be better no? Equity can't be spent now.

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shady-lady
I like the idea of DB as a managed service but in effect this surely means
that 3rd party has access to the data?

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serveradminblog
Are they generous or this is just to avoid Server Side Public License from
PostgreSQL ?

~~~
Tostino
What do you mean? How would this have anything to do with changing the
license?

