lol couldn't you say that Postgres is EEE for SQL? It embraced SQL, has added new functions and incompatible constructs to SQL... is it going to extinguish SQL next?

I think what you're trying to say is that just because someone - especially [large company] - tries to improve/integrate popular open projects doesn't mean it's always EEE.

Which I doubt EEE is purposeful the majority of the time initially, even if has the potential to become that later. In the case of google I think this would be a case of "how do we add value to our product to sell" followed by "this feature costs us too much resources to maintain, let's cut it and focus on [new feature]"

That being said Postgres is not a good example because AFAIK they're both not a commercial entity (or any registered entity at all?) and they're true FOSS. At the moment they have no commercialization strategy (sponsorships maybe?) and no ability to extinguish anything given their open license and lack of any proprietary services.

It does provide plenty of PG specific capabilities, but PG has always had much better conformance to SQL standards and support for all the standard features than other DBs like MySQL. It's one of the most compatible DBs from a few points of view.

Yes, that's the "embrace" part.

I guess my point is that "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is a really outdated saying and I hate it. Embracing and Extending are really good things.

The "Extend" stage is the key: it's actually supposed to refer to attempts to introduce "better" / "more advanced", but proprietary and inherently implementation-locked technologies into an implementation (and thus into the platform the implementation implements); where these technologies don't complement, but instead supersede the use of the platform's existing open-standards capabilities, for those using this implementation.

In the "Extinguish" stage, the open-standards capabilities are then deprecated in favor of these proprietary technologies — in theory just for the implementation itself, but in practice ecosystem-wide, due to the implementation's majority user share. As the locked-in nature of the component makes it impractical to offer any other implementations of it, all other implementations "fall behind" due to lacking this component, supporting fewer and fewer greenfield projects, until users give up on them, "Extinguishing" their market-share.

The "Extinguish" stage only makes sense insofar as the technologies introduced in the "Extend" stage have inherent implementation lock-in. Otherwise, it's just a regular open-standards dueling-RFC-banjos scenario, not EEE.

With Internet Explorer, the "Extend" phase was when Microsoft attempted to get people to write ActiveX components (that could only ever possibly work on Windows, since the ActiveX "platform API" is just "the entire Windows API") instead of writing JS. If doing this had become popular, no website that did it would have worked on any other browser than IE (and so there would have had to be "the ActiveX-enhanced IE version" and "the regular HTML version" of the site. Which was actually a thing for a short while... though only on Microsoft's own web services, AFAIK.)

Postgres is open source and free, so accusing them of EEE wouldn't make any sense.

It's not like Google is famous for dropping projects.