There are three emerging standards in the world of data: Postgres, Open Telemetry, and Iceberg.

Postgres is arguably a standard already. OTel and Iceberg are nascent but they have the same ingredients helped Postgres become the world's most popular database. I've been asked many times "why did Postgres win?". The typical response is "extensibility", which is correct, but incomplete.

Besides being a great product, Postgres has some important open source dynamics: the nuance lies in the open source model.

I've realized there are three tenets of open source. Developers will assess the "open sourceness" of any project by:

License: is the license OSI-approved.