Maintaining an open source community requires strenuous efforts. While some leaders gain success in this community-driven world, a large number of novices have to face failure on their journey. Open Source For You reached Bruce Momjian, co-founder of PostgreSQL Global Development Group and senior database architect at EnterpriseDB, to know what strategies he builds to enhance community contributions and make Postgres successful in the market.
“If you do not treat your employees well, they are not going to treat your customers well,” explains Momjian. “Organisations adopt this method of success. And undoubtedly, this is vital to grow a community.”
Postgres is competing against some of the renowned relational database management systems including MySQL. But Momjian optimistically considers the database incomparable.
“I do not think there is a competitor for Postgres,” the co-founder, who has worked on the open source database system since 1996, told Open Source For You.
Service culture is the key
Momjian believes that in an open source community, maintaining a service culture is important to influence the contributors.
“There are mainly five to seven types of leaders. You can find a visionary leader like Steve Jobs, an institutional leader like Jack Welch, an inspiring leader like Oprah and a servant leader like John Willard Marriott,” he says, adding, “Leaders need to train people according to their industry.”
Instead of highlighting deficiencies, Momjian prefers to bring out the best to build harmony in the community. “Everyone has some deficiencies, but when you interact with somebody and able to bring out the best and minimise the deficiencies in that person, you gains the big success. This is what we consider as the Postgres community,” he discloses.
India needs to bring non-affiliated contributors
Open source is getting huge focus from Indian developers. But Momjian says that Postgres is one of the community solutions that is yet to receive mass contributors from the country.
“India has many people employed by the Postgres-enabled companies. But we presently do not have many non-affiliated contributors to Postgres from India,” he underlines.
Future of database management systems using open source power
Momjian thinks that open source databases are in an ideal position to lead data storage needs in the future. He says, “Data storage needs are changing rapidly as databases are being used by new applications. Open source databases are in an ideal position to lead that innovation.”
Catch the full interview of Bruce Momjian in the April issue of Open Source For You. It includes insights from EnterpriseDB and details all the key features debuting with PostgreSQL 10.
