[Info-Ingres] ingres janitors

[Karl & Betty Schendel]

At 3:16 PM +0000 11/16/07, On Web wrote:
>"Karl & Betty Schendel" <schendel at kbcomputer.com> wrote in message
>news:mailman.83.1195223532.18164.info-ingres at kettleriverconsulting.com...
>> At 12:03 PM +0000 11/16/07, On Web wrote:
>>>
>>>If there was a clear trend that people are keen to board the ingres
>>>development train, I'd support the programme, but without any evidence
>>>that
>>>the demand exists (or can be built) then I think it will cost ingres money
>>>and worse still divert effort away from initiatives that can make money or
>>>build market share.
>>
>> I think you miss a crucial point:  this *IS* an initiative that
>> can make money and/or build market share.  The Apprentices /
>> Janitors project is a motivator to get the whole open source
>> community thing going for real.
>
>I don't see how it's going to help it get it going for real. It'll help
>Datallegro and Marty, but you guys are doing what you do even without the
>initiative.

Yeah, but it's *hard*.  This initiative will make it easier.
It's not always going to be just me here, you know.  (In fact,
it's already not just me;  Jim Gramling is working on Ingres
code along with me at Datallegro, and he's had a much tougher
learning curve than it needed to be.)  How it's going to help
for real is by developing resources and lowering barriers,
so that my *next* hire has an easier time of it.

Maybe you don't see how this initiative will help, but maybe
that's a "trust me".  I DO see it helping, a lot, if it works.

>
>What will motivate an open-source developer to hook up to ingres (besides
>ease of accessibility)? If ingres doesn't get a significant group of
>developers together then I don't see how it can be worthwhile.

I'm not sure I understand what you are suggesting.
It almost sounds like you are saying you don't see how
we can win, so we shouldn't play.  I see it the other way
around:  if you don't play, you CAN'T win.
The Apprentices initiative is a relatively low cost,
decent return way to start playing.  A similar idea
has been working for the Linux kernel, which IMHO (*)
is as least as difficult a code base in many respects.

I don't want to be twisting your words here, so feel free
to clarify if I misunderstood.

(*) My first contribution/bug fix into the kernel was accepted
a couple weeks ago, so I'm now qualified to render opinions.
Right?  Right?  :-)

>
>I tend to regard open-source a bit like thegreen movement. It's trendy to be
>green and it's trendy to be open-source. It's a badge. It makes for
>interesting press releases and company promotion at negligible cost.

and does green PR help companies that only issue PR?  no, in the
long run, it hurts them because it becomes obvious that they are
only paying lip service.

Same here.  Open source has real meat behind it, just like
resource usage awareness does, and if you only talk the talk,
you'll get caught out sooner or later.  Then it hurts instead
of helping.

>I think that the open-source projects that have been successful have come
>from development communities getting together to build a product/cool
>system, rather than from established companies with mature product who
>decide to go open-source.

That's true only because what Ingres has done is extremely
uncommon, and possibly unique.  Going from proprietary to
open-source has some unique challenges, but they have to
be addressed.  Otherwise, Ingres Corp might as well change their
slogan to "The Tastes Great Less Filling RDBMS", or "The
RDBMS Starting With The Letter I", or some equally content
free hook.

>At the moment ingres has to do that chasing - there are too many other
>alternatives for people to buy into. If I have some fantastic ruby package
>that requires a special database plug in to function am I going to invest my
>development effort in ingres or MySQL? Which will give me the best return on
>my investment?

Perhaps you're looking too far ahead.  Today, and maybe even tomorrow,
J Random Developer might choose MySQL.  Without this initiative,
or something equivalent, that's not going to change.  WITH it,
Ingres can take that next step and go after mr JRD, because
he'll have resources to help him out.

I'm awake now, thanks for livening things up.  :-)

Karl