Not a good precedent as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think you're being very fair here, honestly. I doubt anyone with any kind of Postgres responsibility is intentionally leaving people exposed, or considers some users more privileged than others.
If these are the best excuses for lack of full transparency one could could come up with, then why would anyone choose a Linux distro? Or any of the *BSDs for that matter? Transparency and an expectation of due diligence is why a lot of companies (in IT and elsewhere) still stay in business while choosing Open Source software.
Besides, Postgres isn't some run-of-the-mill startup with a dropped letter domain name. It's a venerable software foundation with almost 20 years of work and experience behind it. Which makes this a questionable course of action on their part despite the need for discretionary release.
Heroku has certainly done a lot to demonstrate how effective postgres can be practice, in addition to other contributions ).
All that being said, we don't actually know what the fix looks like, or indeed what their code looks like either right? For all we know this could be being pushed upstream? It could in some other way be unsuitable for general consumption/adoption at this time. It is possible that the fact that Heroku is going to burn it in will end up uncovering an issue or some other fact that will benefit the project, or they may be uniquely "extra" vulnerable because of deviations.
The PostgreSQL license cuts(so to speak) both ways in this case: http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/
Heroku has things like: https://postgres.heroku.com/fork
they are a database as a service, not a distributor of software.
I'm not an expert in this field but it seems like the proper thing to do would be to announce a release date that gives everyone sufficient time to prepare and then give it to everyone.
Calling it closed source is just rhetoric. You just don't think they are moving fast enough or that there should be pragmatic reasons to give favorable treatment to any users.
And so I think it's valid to say Postgres is open source, so fix it yourself if you don't want to wait for the people who are fixing it for you for free.
Whilst it's not closed source in the traditional sense, it very much exists (there's no doubt about this) and isn't available to the general population so therefore, IMHO, is closed source.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the need to stage the release however I don't agree with the priority/privileged access.
This is also rhetoric, not to mention damaging and insulting. You know damn well that nobody can "fix it themselves." It's not known what the problem is, let alone how to fix it. For any amount of money.
It's not even about the wait time. The entire point of the embargo is that no one releases early. I initially thought this was an early release, though given that heroku uses a service model it probably isn't. The postgres team obviously cares deeply about handling this in the right way. A great many people value that, myself included.
I will be curious to know who identified the problem initially.