On 6/6/2005 8:27 PM, Nick Leeson wrote:

> Hi, 
> My name is Nick and I am a graduate student researching the economic
> aspects of Open Source Software; I have a very small query!!
> 
> Was the Slony project purely conceived in the PostgreSQL OSS community
>  or it based on the eRServer Code 'released' by PostgreSQL Inc back in
> Aug 2003? Put in different words, is Slony a good example of the
> community adopting a hitherto'closed' product 'opened' for the
> community by a commecial organization?
> I would appreciate if someone could clarify!

The Slony-I project was not based on any previous code at all. Some 
ideas for algorithms have been inspired from studying the original 
eRserver prototype code written by Vadim Mikeev.

The project was sponsored by Afilias (http://afilias.info) by hiring a 
PostgreSQL CORE developer (me) and having him work fulltime on it. But 
aside from receiving the usual open source benefits, there have never 
been any commercial plans for it. Afilias is a contributing open source 
community member. As a logical consequence the entire project was from 
the moment the original concept was published developed open source and 
publicly available.

So Slony-I is NOT an example of the community adopting formerly closed 
source code. It is a good example for how a company can be a valuable 
community member.


Jan

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