Vince, Peter:
I can definitely understand someone not wanting to *participate* in
marketing/advocacy of PostgreSQL. However, your being opposed to
promoting PostgreSQL as an organized activity *at all* baffles me. How
can you be against promoting PostgreSQL? Don't you want poeple to use
your code?
For me, it's not just a matter of preference, but of necessity; if
Postgres becomes obscure, I stop being able to participate in the
project. While there are people on this list who are fortunate enough
to be able to code whatever they want and still get paid, for a lot of
people, our participation hinges on the cycle:
Postgres Users --> Postgres Contracts --> Postgres Jobs --> Postgres
Contributors --> Improvement *and Promotion* of Postgres --> Postgres
Users ...
The Promotion part of that step is *not* dispensable; all of the best
features in the world are not going to expand the Postgres commmunity
if people haven't heard of it, can't find it, and know a lot more about
MySQL anyway. While this may not be true for everybody, some of us
have clients or bosses who do read trade periodicals and demand that we
follow their technology reccomendations. I already have one client
using MySQL because of MySQL's "much more professional" web site and
"better support" and "better performance".
Frankly, if we blow off marketing PostgreSQL as "irrelevant", we
*deserve* to get steamrollered by MySQL.
I think it's terrific that Postgres is a real, programmer-centric,
democratic Open Source project. I believe that programmers and
contributors should lead the project, and decide features and schedules
based on technical and not marketing reasons. Nobody on the Advocacy
team is trying to take control of the project and turn it into a
dot-com.
But once Postgres has been packaged, we need to have a group making a
loud enough noise to get the world to pay attention. I'm not asking
everyone on this list to participate, but I am asking everyone on this
list to recognize the utility of the effort.
-Josh Berkus