Re: Toward A Positive Marketing Approach.

Michael,

Howdy, glad to see you came back.

> 1. We should treat all marketing efforts by hackers/programmers as
> social bugs. Get some marketing pros (debuggers) in on this, or the
> popularity of postgresql will continue to pale in the real world.

Not really in line with PostgreSQL's "personality". This could work for
OpenOffice, but not here. PG is a very engineering-central project and there
aren't many people who want to change that.

Your other comments have been mostly answered, but:

> 3. Reward existing FOSS projects that make sensible provision to
> accomodate postgresql in preference to other more "commercial" db's.
> Free links, mention in newsletter, listing on websites, whatever it
> takes to start pulling other open source communities behind postgresql.
> A good example is bitweaver.org, a great integration project, very
> professional, helpful to small businesses, but needs some promotional help.
>
> 4. Stop being too cheap. Money Talks! Offer to PAY premiums to major
> OSS aps who don't do pg, or don't do it well enough. Like Compierre,
> like Drupal.

Actually, what projects who don't have a bias against PostgreSQL mostly need
is developer time to help them with code. Drupal already supports Postgres;
they need DBAs to help them be faster/better on Postgres. They are in the
same boat with lots of other projects, so much so that there is more demand
than there are PG volunteers.

If you have Postgres DBA experience, I'll be happy to hook you up with
someone.

Other projects need even more intensive coding help. OpenOffice, for example,
doesn't offer the Postgres driver by default because it's still too buggy.
That would be solvable with money, but $1000 to $2000, not $50.

I do think that we could use a list of what other mature OSS projects support
PostgreSQL reasonably well already. This is pretty much a data collection
effort; are you volunteering for it? We could use it.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco