Re: merging advocacy and "overview"

On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 03:25, Justin Clift wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> <snip>
> > OK, but what about dotgeek? They provide a valuable service to the
> > community by giving free webhosting with postgresql. Are they a
> > community sponsor too ? Heck, by that token the Open Source Technology
> > Group ought to be listed as well, since we have software available from
> > both sourceforge and freshmeat, along with several important side
> > projects.
>
> Interesting thought.
>
> Um, I think the distinction here is that Elein is intimately personally
> involved in the PostgreSQL Community and spends a lot of time and effort
> to further our Community *specifically*.
>
> If the people of dotgeek and OSTG were consistently doing the same, then
> we'd probably consider them a lot more "part of the family" than we do.
>
> Does that yardstick make sense?
>

Doesn't Adi work for OSTG? He is a regular on IRC and attended OSCon
where I saw him promoting PostgreSQL on a number of occasions.

But I think this misses the point. What contributions has Varlena LLC
made that don't go outside the realm of the those things controlled by
the PostgreSQL Community? I see no articles/content written for either
the main website or techdocs. I see no code contributions. I see no
projects that are sponsored. There is nothing there that doesn't go
directly back to Varlena. Varlena isn't the only company that operates
like this, take Kineticode for example. They provide a service to the
community free of charge, they help promote postgresql in a number of
ways, heck they even have someone who is quite chummy with the community
working for them, but I just don't think of them as a corporate sponsor,
nor do I think they need special recognition; if you use bricolage
you'll find out about them. Maybe I am just setting the bar to high, but
how far are we going to go the other way? If a company designates a
person to be a regional contact does that make them a corporate
sponsor? Or even worse, perhaps I could strike a deal with some company
to host the weekly news on the web, and in return they would get to
drive traffic to their website and get listed as a postgresql corporate
sponsor? Is this where we want things to go? One reason why I've
always insisted that if we were going to put the weekly news on the web
we would do it on a community controlled website is because I don't want
things to go there. Apparently I'm in the minority on this position
though.

Robert Treat
--
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