People,
> > It also means more users to support. Depending on the mix of new users,
> > the overall effect on the project could end up being negative.
>
> This is easily the saddest statement I have seen in this thread. Are we
> so l33t that we are unwilling to help newbies come to our wonderful
> project?
This is all irrelevant to the discussion. As Peter pointed out, going to
conferences gives us new users, and joining standards bodies and benchmarks
gives us new users. So we're not talking about dropping recruitment.
The argument presented is that we are either already attending enough OSS
conferences to cover new user recruitment from that population, OR that the
quality of users recruited from OSS conferences is relatively low (compared
to other methods), OR that OSS conferences let us recruit new users but
provide no benefits for existing users (unlike standards bodies). Based on
one of these three arguments (take your pick) some PostgreSQL community
members think that paying for PostgreSQL speaker travel to conferences with
insufficient budget should be a very low priority (all other things being
equal) for SPI Funds.
So, can we move this discussion back on-topic?
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco