FAQ

For technical questions about PGXN, see the specification FAQ.

General FAQ

What license will PGXN code be under?

The PostgreSQL License. Note that the actual extensions themselves may be under any open source license, according to their authors.

Can other people contribute to PGXN?

Definitely! Contributions and help with refining the specification are very welcome. Major code contributions may be funded out of the PGXN fund based on circumstances. Any contributions must be submitted under The PostgreSQL License.

Who will own and run PGXN once the code is finished?

Hopefully the Web Team of PostgreSQL.org will run PGXN on community servers. If they choose not to administrate it, PGXN will be run on one or more servers to be contributed to the PostgreSQL Fund at SPI, Inc. In any case, the PGXN master index and server, once fully operational, will be owned by a PostgreSQL-related nonprofit organization.

Where will the PGXN source code and project be hosted?

On GitHub. What can we say? We like GitHub.

Fundraising FAQ

For technical questions about PGXN, see the specification FAQ.

Is this a charitable donation?

No. Because of the potential commercial applications of anything done with PostgreSQL, the fundraising for this project is being handled by a for-profit company. Corporations donating to the project can, of course, declare their contributions as a marketing or R&D expense.

Where is the money going?

Mostly to pay for David Wheeler’s mortgage and preschool for his daughter while he works full-time on making PGXN a reality. A minority of the funding will be used for hosting and related expenses. For more detail, see the project status.

But if PGXN is a community project, why are you using it to raise money. Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

It depends on your point of view. If you believe that there should be no financial aspect to an open source project, then you might see fundraising for David’s time as a conflict of interest.

But we don’t. This is a project that David Wheeler really wanted to take on and to contribute to the community. Without raising funds, he would never have the time to work on it. Rest assured that once the fundraising goal has been met, the site will not be used to raise funds again. The fundraising is entirely toward the greater goal of providing the community with a valuable resource.

Why is David Wheeler the best person for this project?

David Wheeler has been driving the idea of having an extensions network in the PostgreSQL community for more than 6 months, and developed the specification and got it approved. He’s a talented Perl coder and has a lot of experience with CPAN which will be relevant to the effort. Mostly, David Wheeler cares enough about this effort to make sure that it gets completed this year. Other PostgreSQL Experts staff will be helping with the project as well, most notably Andrew Dunstan and Quinn Weaver.

Why is this project being run by PostgreSQL Experts?

The PostgreSQL community currently has no precedent or staff for organizing paid code or infrastructure development through the nonprofit community. In contrast, many of the companies associated with PostgreSQL do have that experience: 2nd Quadrant, SRA, EnterpriseDB, and PostgreSQL Experts, among others. It is also legally unclear whether US non-profits are allowed to do this kind of project.

Isn’t PostgreSQL Experts making a lot of money off this?

No. The current budget for this project provides no corporate profit and the compensation to David Wheeler is just barely break-even, and is a fraction of normal consulting rates.

Will you be selling ads on PGXN?

No. The closest thing you’ll ever see to ads on the site are the logos and links for Founding contributors and possibly, if hosting and/or bandwidth is provided by a commercial entity one day, a logo and link to that entity (like the YellowBot logo currently in the footer of The CPAN Search Site). We will not be selling ads, or putting Google ads or anything similar on the site, ever.

What happens if you raise more than $25,000?

In that unlikely event, any additional money would be used for two purposes: (a) to fund one or more PGXN servers and hosting costs for one or more years, and/or (b) to fund Dimitri’s extension module project.

What if you don’t complete the project?

Donors will get refunds. We are guaranteeing completion of the project. To that end, each milestone is marked with a percentage of the project that milestone represents; contributors will get a portion of their donations refunded for any not completed within 7 months of project start.