Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 12:40, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
> > This release, I think our theme should be corporate involvement.
> > Aside from the specific features (which speak for themselves) what's
> > news over the last year is the amount of interest and sponsorship
> > we've received from various commercial entities, including feature
> > sponsors SRA, FJ and Afilias and code contributor Command Prompt, as
> > well as our existing sponsors like RH and PGInc and probably others
> > I'm forgetting.
>
> I like to think that the theme of any press release announcing a new
> software release should be "what does this do for me".  (This is more
> generally true of anything you write.)  We have plenty of new features
> that you can map to prominent terms such as flexibility, performance,
> safety, ease of administration, etc. while still staying on topic and
> conveying actual information to the public.  The mention of corporate
> involvement is going to make everyone yawn.  It will be of brief
> interest to those so-called market analysts, but it will do absolutely
> nothing for our users and potential users.
>
> If you want to make points about business momentum, you can do that in
> separate activities.  Forcing this in the release announcement press
> release can lead to several impressions:
>
> "Oh, there are so few interesting features in this release, they need to
> fill the space with their sponsors."
>
> "Oh, they're so desperate to show off their business momentum, they need
> to mention three companies I've never heard of."
>
> "Oh, my beloved PostgreSQL is being taken over by evil corporations."
>
> Who cares about business momentum anyway?  Tell me about feature
> momentum.

Beautifully put. This is a press release of what makes PostgreSQL 8.0
what it is. What is PostgreSQL and what can it do for me? I'm not
interested in what companies market their own versions.

Should we expect that when linux kernel 3.0 is out that we'll see
mentions of Red Hat and Novell selling great commercial versions that
use kernel 3.0?

In my opinion, I would stick to what is included in 8.0 when you
download the package off the site. plPerlNG, plPHP, Slony-I, etc are all
ADDONs and should be represented as such. Otherwise you get a bunch of
people who didn't read the release properly, download it..install it and
find that you dont see plPHP in contribs/ and where is this Slony
replication they spoke of? Hmm, not in the source tree. I have to
download it seperately...etc. For someone new to open source and/or
postgresql this might come across as generating too much hype over 3rd
party products (which these are). The 3rd party projects/products don't
make PostgreSQL what is, they only help enhance it. *the cherry on top*

my 2 cents,

Robby


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