Re: News links, post 'em here - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

 >
 > It's pretty clear that we have 2 kinds of french articles available to
 > cover the news, some of them are talking about PostgreSQL the Open
 > Source project and some of them are explaining to potential customers
 > who to contact if they want to use Ora2PG.
 >
 > The only reason why the french news coverage looks great in the wiki
 > listing is because both kinds of news are listed as community efforts.
 >

Dimitri,

I don't understand what you mean by this. Anyone promoting the
PostgreSQL release is part of the "community effort", whether you're a
DBA doing it on your spare time or you're a PR professional paid to do
it. So I don't see any reason for this corporate/community opposition.

Like I said journalists need multiple sources. When we release a new
version, if they can get the information from multiple points and in
various formats, this will give more value to the message and make it
more relevant. Journalists will also have more material to write their
articles.

Like I said I think we should do PR like we do code. When there a
message to send, we should fork it and hack it. BSD-style. We're never
gonna beat Oracle PR if we do things like they do. Instead we need to
invent a better way to communicate, using our assets : multiplicity,
creativity and collaborative culture.

Speaking for DALIBO, we do our own translation of the press release,
then we add some local-related content (for example last year we added a
paragraph bout French government agencies switching to PostgreSQL), we
put some additional quotes and we tell journalist we're available for an
interview. Everything we add is focused on promoting PostgreSQL and it's
community... And of course, we provide a link to the original version so
that journalist can compare our content and the official one.

I understand that you are afraid that some companies could "hijack" the
community efforts and inject their own marketing in the process BUT :

1/ Journalists are not that dumb :) They don't copy/paste press release
without reading it. They receive dozens of press releases all day long
and they can tell what's advertising and what's real news. That's their
job ;-)

2/ IT journalists are aware of the nature of the PostgreSQL. At least
all the ones I talked to. They know that it's not owned by a single
company. They know that some tools are open source and other are not.

3/ PostgreSQL companies are not marketing bullies :) We all know the
difference between advertising corporate services and promoting the
project. I'm not saying there's never been any problem but I believe it
was always unintentional. And it can always be discussed on
pgsql-advocacy or pgsql-www

That being said if you have problem with the way this release was
treated by the French media: you can either contact the journalists
directly or express the problem more clearly here and give examples of
what you think is inappropriate.

Regards,

--
Damien