While attending the hallway track, I was talking to a gentleman whose name escapes me. He asked me how he could contribute to the community. I am always excited to have that conversation because we are able to discuss all kinds of different ways to contribute, whether it be social (user groups, pgday, speaking at alternative conferences), documentation, code, or infrastructure. Bringing people to the community truly inspires me to continue building our community into something special.

Then he said, "I talked to X and he said, 'Why would I tell you that, you are my competitor?'" I was stunned. It is a sad and unacceptable ideology to hold within any open source community. It is an ideal that should be left to bad business practices from past decades. It is a horrible statement to make to any potential community member and speaks to a less than stellar understanding of how our community works.

If any person asks you how they can help with .Org, you should answer them honestly and enthusiastically. If you don't know how they can help, find a contributor and help the new person get connected. You should do this for any person looking to contribute, no matter who they work for (even if it is a competitor). Any other way of handling it is taking away from the community and is a testament to a selfishness that has no place here.

We are an inclusive community and that means we recognize something greater than ourselves. We recognize the power of a sustainable, productive .Org that is a collaborative space without the belittling behavior described in this post. I strongly hope that we can eliminate negative behavior such as this and become the most unified, bad-ass, and truly open source project around.

The feature I offered to the individual was to allow pg_basebackup to use multiple connections (jobs) to pull a basebackup. In a similar vein to how pg_dump and pg_restore.