I think it's important to understand that while aD is interested in spreading the religion of the ACS, as Ben puts it, aD-the-company is structured around building complex websites for companies with deep pockets. They've got more business than they know what to do with, which is why they're recruiting people far and wide. Given Philip's goals and aspirations, it's the only strategy for them to take.
Certainly making the ACS available on Postgres can only help aD in their secondary mission of spreading the ACS religion. But doing so isn't of much help in the primary mission of establishing aD itself as a force in the web development world. For the class of customer aD is chasing, Oracle's still the right choice and will be for some time. So it is only natural that while Philip might be personally curious about the ACS-PG port, he doesn't see it as important in the short term to aD. And their focus is very much on the short term at the moment.
This reality is also why parts of the ACS are somewhat disorganized, they're just not in a position to sit back and clean things up. aD's just moving too quickly.
I'd love to say that Postgres or some other Open Source alternative could unseat Oracle in that world, but we're not there yet. And, frankly, the cost of an Oracle license is just a fraction of the start-up cost for major sites - the Garnter group claims $1,000,000 is typical.
Long-term, I think the full Open Source solution has incredible potential. Short-term, I started porting small portions of it last year because I'm working on a personal project that benefits from using the ACS and Postgres. That's enough motivation for me. What I hope to see short-term are intriguing sites thrown up in short order by ACS-PG afficianados, I can think of nothing better to trigger broader interest in not only the port, but the ACS per se.
So, don't just play around folks, do something cool! Given the cost of deploying Oracle, there's no reason why the majority of cool ACS-based sites shouldn't be based on the Postgres version. Make it so!
aD could really benefit from this port in ways that perhaps Philip's not considered. For instance, someone who's built an intriguing site using the ACS-PG port should be a good aD employee candidate, able to immediately jump in and help with contract site development. And so forth. So as time goes on, perhaps aD will work with us to make it easier for us to keep the port aligned. Perhaps not. I'm not depending on it, and neither is Ben. I don't judge aD negatively because of this. After all the code's available and porting it is a heck of lot easier than recreating it from scratch, with or without active help from aD!
