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companies with ties to Postgres, to expedite patches to their respective user bases.

The key point here is that the interplay and cooperation between vendors, open source community
members, and end users enables innovation in new ways. Many of the individual players flow
across organizational lines.

End users of a given open source distribution may make contributions to the technology.
Vendors’ employees may drive the technology forward based upon customer input and make
their own contributions to the code.

It is because of the spirit of a shared ownership of the technology and of the responsibilities, that
when a customer or a contributing member of the community brings up an issue, it is taken on its
merits.

Contributions are what drives open source, and they take many forms, from contributions of code
but also contributions of finding issues and identifying vulnerabilities.

One of the valuable attributes of open source solutions is that they are by their nature more
transparent, and therefore it is easier for end users to work in cooperation with vendors, for vendors
to work together as partners and for the community to move the technology forward.
It takes a community, not just one company, to innovate and to keep things secure.

About the Author

As vice president of strategy and product management, Lenley
Hensarling plays a major role in setting EDB’s strategic direction
through product development and customer and partner interactions.
A longtime J.D. Edwards executive, Hensarling went on to leadership
roles at PeopleSoft then Oracle.

His roots are in engineering and he quickly rose to vice president of
engineering at Novell. Lenley has more than two decades of
experience in the software industry in large enterprise technology
organizations.

25 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – September 2015 Edition
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