Tom Lane is a great guy. He saved my tail a few months back on the postgresql mailing list when I was up against a real head-scratcher of a bug. It turned out to be a simple misconfiguration on my part, but he patiently walked me through the debugging process, even parsing my ktrace dump to diagnose the issue. My respect and many thanks to this guy. Congratulations to him on the transition.
theres quite a few postgres developers that i like.
you pop on their channel as a perfectly unknown guy with a complex issue, expose it like a noob, and they actually help you and explain to you what and why.
I find such people amazing. they don't just give you a solution, but explain it well to you. they also seem to understand the problems easily. they're my little heros.
I clearly remember that somewhere in 2001 I wrote to postgres (-bugs maybe) mailing list about a problem that we had with one of our server (it's a pity I didn't find the thread on the archives). pg_xlog run out of space due to some problem with WAL files recycling mechanism. I got a reply from Tom almost immediately asking for more details. After a few hours he saved my day sending me a freshly baked patch that solved the problem. amazing. I have a deep respect for him.
with the wave of other db's (schema and non schema based) that have swept through the industry over the last 10 years, I feel like a small town pastor in my tendency for conservatism and my deeply ingrained faith in postgres.
Continuing the religious theme, having been raised in a Pentecostal area (SW Missouri), one of the things I like about PostgreSQL is that I haven't felt the desire to lay my hands upon any of my servers and intone, "Lord, HEAL this database. SHOWER your MERCY upon...."
It's comparable to the quality I've enjoyed with Oracle and DB2 on Solaris and Windows in the bad old days, and has all the features I need to declaratively enforce consistency, correctness and referential integrity.
I filed my first ever bug report on Postgres last week and had a good experience thanks to Tom Lane. I was miffed there was no real bug tracker, just "email us", and figured my report would go ignored. Nope: Tom confirmed the bug and patched it in less than a day. Dedication like that is why Postgres has slowly been succeeding. http://www.postgresql.org/search/?m=1&l=8&q=%238167
Lane is also the former head maintainer of libjpeg, which means just about any web browser or image editor uses some derivative of his code. That's pretty impressive.
I'm speaking for myself and what I think, rather than on behalf or Postgres or any company. I assume you are also referring to the possibility of a private fork.
What I've seen in the Postgres community is a group of developers that takes an aggressive stance against companies "taking advantage" of the developer community. Companies that invest both time and money in development get far more attention for their patches than companies that try to either throw code over the fence, or do "drive by" development projects.
Tom deciding to take this job indicates to me that it is because Salesforce is making a significant investment in open source Postgres.
to add a small thing to what Selena already said, Salesforce is sponsoring the "Unconference" day at PgCon 2013 (held in Ottawa this week). It could be nothing but it seems to me a good thing.
Despite of that, I think that if Salesforce will let Tom to focus on postgresql development as RedHat did in the past we(1) are ok.
