Re: Sixth Draft - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

josh@bitbuckets.com wrote:
> August 24, 2004 - The PostgreSQL Global Development group today
> announced the availability of the 8.0 version of the PostgreSQL

What this press release is announcing is that the PGDG made the software
available.  The press release should not announce that the PGDG
announced something.

> Object-Relational Database Management System, the most advanced open

The o, r, d, m, and s have no reason to be capitalized.

> source database in the world today.  With this new release,

Not "database", but "database management system".

> professional users have an world-class, scalable, open source
> database solution that does not sacrifice many of the conveniences
> provided by commercial products.
>
> PostgreSQL 8.0 contains many new features that make the database a
> strong contender against the likes of Oracle and DB2.  Many

I'm not too sure about "contender".  Maybe "viable alternative" sounds
less desparate.

> companies, who view PostgreSQL as a strategic part of their overall
> I.T. plan, have sponsored development of the new features, which
> include:

> Tablespaces:  This feature, also funded by Fujitsu, allows the
> database administrator to choose which filesystems are used for
> schemas, tables, and indexes.  This allows the administrator to place
> whole databases on separate disks to improve performance.

Placing whole databases on separate disks doesn't necessarily increate
performance.  A more obvious and well-known performance boost is
placing *part* of a database on a separate disk.

> - PostgreSQL added to its roster of stored procedure languages with
> PL/PerlNG and PL/PHP which were sponsored by consultancy Command
> Prompt, Inc. as well as PL/Java and the .Net provider Npgsql.

Someone probably sponsored PL/Java and Npgsql as well.  It's not
balanced.

> Version 8 is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building
> on almost twenty years of development dating back to the University
> of California at Berkeley.

Something can only "date back" to a point in time, not to an
organization.  And considering that the UCB still exists today, this
cannot be interpreted by an outsider.  Maybe "traced back" would work.

> PostgreSQL is licensed under a BSD-style license, which due to its
> lack of licensing fees allows corporate and individual users more
> flexibility than the competition.

This is an incorrect interpretation of the licensing situation.  There
are plenty of licenses that are granted free of charge but still leave
the recipient without any flexibility.  The advantage of the BSD
license is the lack of restrictions on modication and distribution.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/