UML, PostgreSQL Get Corporate Support

tcopeland writes "An article on NewsForge highlights some changes in the upcoming PostgreSQL release (v7.5) that are funded by Fujitsu. PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus says that "Tablespaces, Nested Transactions, and Java support" are being underwritten by Fujitsu; this has also been mentioned on the postgresql-hackers list. He also says that 7.5 will be "...the most significant new release of the software since version 7.0 almost four years ago". Good times for PostgreSQL users!" And ggoebel writes "Jeff Dike posted a notice to the UML [User-mode Linux] developers mailing list: 'The first bit of news is that as of last Monday, I am working for Intel. They generously offered a full-time position, off-site, with my time mostly spent on UML. This basically means that UML is no longer a part-time, after-hours thing for me, so we should start seeing more work happening on it, especially compared to the last month or two.'"

Comments

All Welcome and expected - expect more..

[eamacnaghten]

This is great news, not only for the projects involved, but for FOSS in general.

Also this is consistent with the Open Source Paradigm. Where it is in the interests of companies to improve the software, and the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of them not being exclusive. It is this philosophy, in my opinion, that will beat proprietary software models such as Microsoft, and it is these companies that are key in stopping those who want to halt the advancments of FOSS using idiotic patents and other invalid IP arguments.

Re:That's all fine and dandy, but...

[SIGALRM]

The true benefit of projects such as this is their independence from the big brother corporations

You mean like Sun and HP funding the Apache group?

Or Novell and Ximian underwriting the Mono Project?

Or IBM contributing to F/OSS?

Do you think these and other projects would be where they are today without the backing of serious money/resources?

Re:Table spaces?

[jadavis]

They are going to reconsider this if someone can write a caching system that can beat the os but so far that hasn't happened.

It's a little more complicated I think. Using the filesystem has other advantages as well:

(1) PostgreSQL can work well with other applications running. Let's say you invent the best caching algorithm possible, then you still have two seperate caches, one for PostgreSQL and one for everything else. That means you have to dedicate the machine to PostgreSQL and have a high PostgreSQL cache (but any other app will suffer), or give postgres a low amount of cache space and it will suffer.

(2) The postgres developers don't want to worry about the bugs involved in making their own filesystem. Also, who's to say they can make a filesystem as fast right off the bat? It might be a huge development effort, with relatively minor benefit for most people.