If anyone wants to keep up with Tom Lane's prolific mailing list contributions without subscribing to the pgsql-hackers firehose, I wrote a Twitter bot that tweets the last sentence (according to some mostly-working regex heuristics) from his e-mails: https://twitter.com/regardstomlane

Postgres is a fantastic community.

Linking to the email would be really good.

That's surprisingly effective. Nice!

Mad love for each of contributor to postgresql whether on this or not, whether backend by organization or not.

Thank you very much for such a wonderful database.

We decided to create a donation fund to support open-source projects that we depend on last year[1]. We rely heavily on PostgreSQL and so just today I was trying to find the best way to contribute to the development of Postgres.

I didn't find much beyond sponsoring official community events[2]. The impression I got was that there are no paid core developers for PostgreSQL, is that correct? If so, what's the best way to support the project financially?

1. https://plausible.io/giving-back 2. https://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/

> The impression I got was that there are no paid core developers for PostgreSQL, is that correct?

There are (I and several of my colleagues, for example) - but they're paid by employers having us work on postgres, rather than a foundation or such.

> If so, what's the best way to support the project financially?

There unfortunately - personal opinion, not as a core team member - is no good way to fund a "partial" developer for postgres right now.

On a smaller scale than employing a dedicated postgres developer, regularly testing the in-development release (and reporting bugs!), doing ad-hoc testing, patch review etc are a bit easier to start with.

Did you check the sponsorship page? https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/sponsorship/ For that matter, does the donation page really state that donations are only used for community events? That's not what I see there.

The best way to give back to open source in general is probably to donate the time of your developers.

Funding isn't used for development in a lot of projects, that is changing somewhat though as people try to monetise open source.

It'd be interesting to see this broken down by organization - i.e. who is funding this development.

not quite what you're asking for, but mostly to satisfy my own curiosity here's the employers of the top 35, pulled from either the postgresql contributor list or linkedin

https://pastebin.com/GYbsEkSu

https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

Tom lane actually works at Crunchy Data. Paul Jungwirth is at illuminated computing if I recall correctly.

Edit: And if looking for 2020, I believe Zenith labs was only founded a few months ago. At the time Heikki was at was vmware, Peter G. was Crunchy Data. And probably half of the EDB ones were 2nd Quadrant including Peter E., Alvarro H. and Vik F. (I think).

And for fun, I ended up doing the same in parallel for the 2021 data:

https://gist.github.com/lfittl/2f112698f908d38f43f4f2aeaaa94...

Note that some of the folks on the list have changed jobs in the last 2 years, so it wouldn't be accurate to attribute all contributions to the current employer (plus some folks contribute on their own time).

Also, the EDB / 2ndquadrant acquisition has led to a lot of EDB-attributed contributions, which hopefully will last :)

Edit: FWIW, I think your 2020 list has Tom Lane working for Google - thats not accurate (I think you got the wrong one from LinkedIn), as he is still employed by Crunchy Data (since leaving Salesforce in 2015), to my knowledge.

I hadn't heard of Tom Lane before. But his prolificness in contributing led me to search for him. And wow. He has quite a history. Co-author or the PNG spec. Major contributor to JPEG's success. Not to mention postgres. At 66 years old and still so actively involved! Very impressive

Heh, yeah I totally found the wrong tom lane on linkedin

In fairness, I didn't find the postgres contributors list until I'd gotten a little further down the list.

And there's still people who don't believe in 10x programmers...

Tom Lane is the best example of a 10x programmer that I have met. Really humble and nice too when you meet him in real life.

That's assuming that these people only contribute to PostgreSQL. I'm betting most of the folks listed here make major contributions on other projects or at work.

Your comment feels like a bit of unfair judgement, particularly since a lot of those you are implying that are 'only 1x programmers' are effectively donating their time.

Thank you, Tom Lane!

I wish I was smart enough to feature on that list.

I’m greatful to everyone who has contributed to postgresql. It’s just so nice to work with.

I feel like it’s got a great community behind it. I jumped into their irc channel a few times to ask odd questions and even if they were dumb stupid questions people were quick to help and answer.

<3 PostgreSQL

Who is Tom Lane?

A single google search resulted in their wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)

Much love to every single one of you!

secret heroes