Subject: Re: [HACKERS] SAP and MySQL ... [and Benchmark]
From: Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org>, Justin Clift <justin@postgresql.org>,
	Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, jim@nasby.net,
	"pgsql-general@postgresql.org" <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
In-Reply-To: <28061.1055480935@sss.pgh.pa.us>
References: <200306111624.h5BGOHe06484@candle.pha.pa.us>
	<200306121149.07785.lamar.owen@wgcr.org>
	<3EE8B881.5070001@postgresql.org>
	<200306122253.36207.lamar.owen@wgcr.org>
	<28061.1055480935@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Date: 13 Jun 2003 10:33:11 -0400
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On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 01:08, Tom Lane wrote:
> Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> writes:
> > On Thursday 12 June 2003 13:29, Justin Clift wrote:
> >> Getting involvement in this from the PostgreSQL Advocacy and Marketing
> >> group would be extremely beneficial as well, as it's presently lacking
> >> vision, coherent plans and goals to bring the vision to reality, and
> >> consistent effort by all but a handful of members.  Good leadership +
> >> direction would be welcome there and should be included in the PostgreSQL
> >> "core" group as well.
> 
> > Is Marc or Bruce not a part of the 'Advocacy and Marketing Group' already?   
> > Let the Advocacy and Marketing group make their suggestions in the open forum
> > of Hackers and see what is thought of it, just like everything else that has 
> > been done to this database.  There are five people on core; their skilset is 
> > varied enough to where any single point of view isn't dominant.
> 
> Actually I think Justin has a point: the core team consists of hackers.
> I believe we do a decent job of leading technical development of
> Postgres, but we're not well-qualified to lead marketing efforts.
> 

Tom, you may not be qualified, but you have an uncanny ability to give
sage advice ;-)

> It doesn't, however, follow that adding some marketing experts to core
> would improve matters.  I think it'd just fragment our attention.
> There's an advocacy/marketing group in place already, and it seems to
> me they should just take the ball and run with it.  They don't need
> core's approval to do the things they can do well.
> 

But we do need core's approval to add legitimacy to our efforts,
especially with some of the "marketing is bad" folks that live on
-hackers.  We also need core's approval to get infrastructure changes
put into place to help our efforts. 

> I wouldn't mind seeing a "core marketing" team evolve to parallel the
> existing "core technical" team.  But it won't happen by vote.  To the
> extent that the hackers community listens to core on technical issues,
> it's because we've achieved respect by hard work.  The core marketing
> team has to step forward and win their credibility the same way.
> 

This overlooks the fact that you can't earn credibility with some of our
community unless you hack on the back-end. The uproar over the 7.3 press
release was a fine example of what happens when the "advocacy" guys try
to make a change to something non-technical that the "technical" guys
don't approve of.


Robert Treat
-- 
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL