Re: [HACKERS] Toward A Positive Marketing Approach.

Dropping -hackers.

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 10:18:00AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 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.

Even better would be if we had someplace where projects looking for help
could go to find volunteers. I think there's a lot of people who use
PostgreSQL and would like to contribute back to the community, but
aren't really able to help from a code standpoint. This would be a great
way for them to get involved.

> 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.

+1
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461