Where to concentrate (was: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase)

I think this probably belongs back on -advocacy, so I'm cc:ing there
so we can move it.

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 03:16:23PM -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Interesting. So they are willing to appear ill-informed in public but
> better informed in private? To what end? That seems strange to me....

To the end of dismissing the serious-but-free competition in public.
If Oracle is talking to the computer press, they have enough
experience to know just how much they can play with stating the way
the world is, and have it quoted verbatim as revealed truth. Apart
from database weenies like us, people reading the Oracle
pronouncement conflating PostgreSQL and other database systems will
just think it's true. After all, Oracle said it, and the press guy
from InfoWorld must have checked it out, right? If you think I'm
being unduly cynical, note that the Gartner comments in their
consulting for ICANN in the .org reassignment basically argued that
PostgreSQL was a significant risk because it wasn't Oracle. There's
nothing _wrong_ with that way of thinking -- corporations are mostly
about stability, which means following conventional (==safe) wisdom.
But that mindset is something that Oracle is skilled at exploiting,
and I'm not surprised they do it against PostgreSQL (even if their
behaviour sounds irrational to someone who really knows the
capabilities of the various systems).

But that isn't really why I replied to this :)

> This is one reason why I would like to see some of us push PostgreSQL
> into a role of *the* RDBMS to study for RDBMS theory. Unfortunately
> this means a lot of documentation written by experts interested in
> really teaching beginners the right way to do things.... I don't
> consider myself qualified to do this by myself.

I like this idea. I wonder how to get it moving.

A
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