Something I wrote for a press contact last month that I wanted to share:

We started the process toward 9.0 last year when we added new committers and invited many new people into the commitfest process (our way of getting lots of patches reviewed, approved and committed every two months). What we’ve found is that we can engage new developers by providing a clear way for them to help in small, well-defined ways.

As a group, we work really hard to recruit and maintain long-term relationships with developers. And that investment in people has paid off really well in 9.0. We have long term commitments from volunteers and independent businesses to implement features that take multiple years to see through to completion. The binary replication is a clear example of that, and we have many other projects underway that are only possible because developers trust our core development team to see them through.

It’s not the most headline-grabbing thing that we do. But it is pretty amazing that a group of people, with no central authority, “benevolent dictator” or business driving it, continue every year to produce a trustworthy, stable and feature-rich database that rivals what’s produced by the best-funded enterprises in the world.

What do you think the best part of the 9.0 release was?