Re: On what we want to support: travel?

All,

I think that Peter has a point here ... both standards bodies and OSS 
conferences attract new users.  The question is what kind of new users 
we want to attract.  That is, while PostgreSQL can always use more Perl 
hackers and OSS-CRMs supporting/using our database, it's probably more 
important to attract the interest of bank CTOs and major manufacturer 
procurement managers.  We want to be evaluated as an enterprise RDBMS 
before an open source RDBMS.  So I can see that.

However, I'll stand my evaluation that we need to work on "bang for the 
buck" basis.  Some of these standards bodies and trade groups can absorb 
enormous amounts of money while delivering questionable benefits (having 
been to TPC meetings, the TPC falls into this class in my mind) wheras 
others are more modest and provide immediate opportunities.  So I might 
put the latter ahead of flying David to Brazil, but not the former.

There's a thing we do at Sun and other large corporations called an 
"ROI" where we go: this is how much money I need, and this is what I 
expect us to get out of it.   I really think this is the approach we 
should take on evaluating expenditures, rather than trying to say 
"category x comes ahead of category y".

--Josh Berkus