Re: Postgres in government

> Sadly, lots of people in positions of power still want scape goats,
> rather than proven results.

No, it could be that the OP's organization is looking for some proof
of postgresql's results.

A lot of people are familiar with the criteria for evaluating
a company or commercial product. Open source products have a
different set of criteria that are sometimes a bit harder to
pin down.

An advantage of a commercial product is that you can ask the
vendor for references from people doing similar work to
what you are doing. As we can see here, that's a bit more
difficult for open source projects.

It's frustrating, but just one of the hurdles you have to face
when advocating open source software. My first experience with
this was in 1991, when I introduced Tcl and Perl into NEC. It
did not happen until Larry Wall's book came out and I could
answer the question "why are these guys doing this? how are
they going to make money to continue to do this?" with "hey
they're giving away the software and making a fortune on the
books!"

> Most surely. It's common when people with business degrees but poor
> understanding of the scientific method get involved.

As opposed to people with science degrees but poor understanding
of business methods? :-)

Cheers,
Mark

--
Mark Harrison
Pixar Animation Studios