The Democratization of Databases
summary
Argues that open source acts like a democratic meritocracy and produces software as good or better than proprietary stacks, with PostgreSQL improving in all directions at once. Cites concrete signals: annual major releases with 170–180 features per release, an ecosystem of 100+ foreign data wrappers, and successful extensions such as PostGIS loaded into Postgres, committers nominate new committers, no single official roadmap, community contributions drive what actually gets built and fixed.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:38Outline
- 3:421. History of Governance Structures
- 5:11Representative Democracy
- 5:41Strengths of Each Structure
- 5:56Democracy Strengths
- 7:55Efficiency and Messiness of Democracy
- 8:11Efficiency of Democracy
- 10:30Ultimate Success of Democracy
- 10:53Democracy's Checkered History
- 12:17Democracy Today
- 13:23Software Governance History
- 13:43Proprietary Autocracy
- 16:54Open Source Democracy
- 18:10Internet Makes Direct Democracy Possible
- 18:30Democratic Development Flow
- 20:03Hybrid Development Models
- 21:05Where Does This Leave Postgres?
- 22:40Rise of Open Source
- 23:42Democracy in Action
- 24:01Postgres Extendability
- 24:16Many Focuses
- 25:17Foreign Data Wrappers
- 27:09PostgreSQL Tenth Anniversary in 2006
- 28:20My Postgres Activities
- 28:50Voting
- 30:42Roadmap
- 31:29PgLife
- 32:10Conclusion
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