Re: 9.5 Release press coverage

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> When you say "our" press coverage, presumably you mean the Postgres
> Community? How can it be "our" press coverage when we are not mentioned
> anywhere? What you mean is that only 40% of the press coverage about
> Postgres 9.5 mentions the people that produced the product. Wow, that has to
> be some kind of international record for poor PR.

I don't think this is true at all. I don't think it's remotely fair.
There was ONE article, since corrected, that made it sound that way.
It's been further corrected since yesterday, BTW, and I can't see what
anyone could remotely fairly complain about in there at this point.
The EDB press releases says *in the first sentence* that the release
was made by the Postgres Community.

> That obscures the truth and is unhelpful to the PostgreSQL Community, since
> we gain strength from acting together.

Yes, we should definitely all avoid making it sound like our own
employers are the whole community. Like, if somebody stood up and
gave a talk called "PostgreSQL Core Roadmap" that spent 90% of its
time talking about the work their own employer was doing, I think that
would obscure the truth and be unhelpful to the PostgreSQL community.
But, you know, it's unreasonable to expect that everybody here is
going to agree with everybody else here does to promote their
business, and I'd like to think we could be a little tolerant of cases
where somebody else's view of what does or does not exactly match up
to our own.

> If we are to consider EDB's contributions, would it not also be reasonable
> to consider other people's contributions as well, since those have been
> obscured?

Of course, but let's not ignore the fact that the official release
announcement does not mention EnterpriseDB, or any EnterpriseDB staff,
or any EnterpriseDB-contributed feature. I'm not going accept a set
of strictures that don't permit my employer to promote itself. Every
other company in the PostgreSQL community does that, and there's no
reason we shouldn't do it, too. More than that, there's no reason we
shouldn't do the best darn job of it that we can. We should of course
not lie or misrepresent when we do that, but we have not. Our press
release seems, at least to me, to clearly distinguish between
PostgreSQL and the community. If that press release got picked up
widely, good. That's why we write press releases.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company