Goodbye

Dear pgAdmin Community,

You may be aware that the pgAdmin project has been in existence for nearly 11 years now. During this time, the development team have spent thousands of hours writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code and documentation, engineering complex features and support for multiple versions of PostgreSQL, Postgres Plus and Greenplum, and providing support to thousands of users. As I'm sure you can understand, after so many years a group of the development team members have reached the point where we feel we've given as much as we can to the project.

Having received a offer from a very large and well known software company for ownership of our copyright to the source code, we have decided to close down the project, effective immediately. I cannot speak for all of my colleagues on the development team but personally I am looking forward to a complete change of lifestyle, having purchased a farm in New Zealand where my family and I will be raising sheep and I get to play thrash metal on my bass guitar as loudly as I like without annoying the neighbours! Magnus tells me he is looking into upgrading his yacht and taking a trip around the world, and Guillaume is going to spend his time drinking wine in his new vinyard at Château Margoux.

Please be aware that the mailing lists and website will be shutdown around 12PM today as the project transitions to its new owner who will be announcing availability of support contracts and professional services shortly.

I'd like to thank all of our users and contributors over the past 11 years - it's been an absolute pleasure working with all of you.

--
Dave Page
pgAdmin Project Lead

pgAdmin moves to the BSD licence

After a huge effort over 18 months or more, involving lawyers, negotiations, tons of emails and new-found detective skills, we've finally changed the pgAdmin licence from Artistic v1.0 to the PostgreSQL variant of the BSD licence. The change is partly in response to criticism of the licence by the FSF who described it as "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear.", but mostly because as a result of those comments (and a court case in the US), Red Hat dropped all Artistic 1.0 licenced packages from Fedora and RHEL.

So, from pgAdmin 1.10 onward the new licence is:

pgAdmin III

Copyright (c) 2002 - 2009, The pgAdmin Development Team

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.

Many thanks to all the past contributors who gave their consent to change the licence, to the rest of the pgAdmin Development Team for helping out with the grunt work, and to Karen from the Software Freedom Law Center for her sage advice.

StackBuilder updates - now with added .NET!!

I finally got time to publish a round of StackBuilder package updates, as well as publish a new package - Npgsql 2.0.4. Npgsql is a mature and well maintained .NET data provider that works with Microsoft .NET and Mono. More information can be found on the project's pgFoundry page and website.

Npgsql 2.0.4 is available through StackBuilder for Windows, Linux 32/64bit and Mac OS X.

Other updates to existing packages for all four platforms are:

phpBB 3.0.4-1
Drupal 6.10-1
mediaWiki 1.14.0-1

Enjoy :-)

Sony game using Postgres technology

Seeing as I've got a few minutes spare having just announced the next pgAdmin beta (checkout the Visual Tour), I figured it was about time for quick blog post to prove I am still alive :-p

Some people will certainly be aware that Sony Online Entertainment are a customer of EnterpriseDB and use our PostgreSQL-derived Postgres Plus Advanced Server product as the database behind a number of the services they offer - none of which I really knew anything about. Well for the first time I can actually point to one of their new games called Free Realms which is built on Advanced Server. I can't say I'm a gamer so I won't even try anything like a review, but it looks like some serious work has gone into it, and I can imagine my kids spending far too much time on it given half a chance!

For an open-source geek this is pretty cool stuff, right up there with Yahoo's use of pgAdmin with their massive Everest database - forget unseen financial systems, company CMSs or website shopping carts - this is code I (and many others) have hacked on and is being used to power fun and interesting stuff that potentially appeals to millions of users.

So, feel free to feed my geek ego and check it out :-)

The first conference of the year

So after a traumatic journey to get the the Eurostar terminal at St. Pancras in London through the most snow we've seen in 20 years around my hometown, I finally arrived in Brussels with Greg for FOSDEM. After settling in to our hotel rooms, we met up with some of the usual suspects and wandered off to our planned dinner at Restobieres where we had a bunch of different beers, and dinner. Various other people joined us throughout the evening, including Magnus and Selena who met in Amsterdam and took the train here.

Which leads me to the point of the post. Well, as much of it as I can remember. After dinner a small group of us decided to go to Cafe Delirium where the FOSDEM beer night was being held. For reasons that now escape me, but were related in some way to us not knowing where on earth we were going, I promised to blame Selena for the fact that we had to follow a MySQL guy (yeah, I know, I know) to the square by the Cafe.

So, whatever the problem was at the time - Selena; it's all you fault.

There - don't say I don't keep a promise :-p

And now, breakfast, and off to day 1 of FOSDEM.

pgAdmin - change of licence

Effective from the 26th February 2009, the pgAdmin Development Team intend to change the licence of pgAdmin III from the Artistic Licence v1.0 to the Artistic Licence v2.0 (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-2.0.php)

The change of licence is in response to criticism of its wording from the Free Software Foundation ("too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear."), as well as issues raised during legal proceedings in the US.

The licence change will apply to future releases of pgAdmin III; both official versions and updates released with PostgreSQL installers. Existing users may, at their option, use older versions under the terms of the new licence.

If you have contributed to the pgAdmin III project in the past and have any questions or objections regarding the intended licence change, please contact me immediately at dpage (at) pgadmin (dot) org.

PostgreSQL Early Experience Installers

Hot on the heels of Devrim's Snapshot RPMs, I'm pleased to say we now have 'early experience' one-click installers available to download and play with the latest features committed to the PostgreSQL and pgAdmin source trees. We're aiming to update the installers periodically after interesting features are added - the first of which is Hitoshi Harada's SQL:2008 Window Functions patch for PostgreSQL.

You can download the installers for Linux 32 and 64 bit, Mac OS X 10.4+ and Windows.

Note that as development builds, these packages have had very little testing and should not be used on production systems.