There’s open source and there’s open source.

There’s genuine free and open source software (FOSS) and then there’s largely locked down proprietary non-dynamic library open source that is generally supplied as a commercially supported version of an open source kernel base that doesn’t see whole lot of real world code commits — and, no, there’s no acronym for that.

Then, there’s other ways of evidencing real open openness such as non-technical contributions (could be language translation/localisation etc.) and then there’s plain old contributions.

Scale-out Postgres database technologies Citus Data is donating 1 percent of its equity to non-profit PostgreSQL organisations in the US and Europe.

The United States PostgreSQL Association says it has received the stock grant and will work with the PostgreSQL Europe organisation to support the growth, education, and future innovation of the open source Postgres database in both the US and in Europe.

To coincide with Citus Data’s equity donation, the company is joining the Pledge 1% movement, alongside technology organisations such as Atlassian, Twilio, Box etc..

 

“When people think about contributing to open source and building sustainable open source communities, there are different approaches,” said Citus Data CEO Umur Cubukcu. “You can open source software you’ve created, you can maintain certain features and projects, and you can contribute to events with speakers and sponsorships — all of which our team spends a lot of time on.”

Founded in 2011, the founders of Citus Data set out to bring the performance and economics of scale-out systems to the field of relational databases.

To give applications the memory, compute, and disk resources of a distributed database cluster, the team at Citus Data created an extension to Postgres that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database — something that was previously not possible with any other relational database, whether proprietary or open source.