On Mar 15, 2008, at 8:58 AM, Ron Mayer wrote:

Greg Smith wrote:
On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:
A silly question in this context: If we know of a company that does use PostgreSQL but doesn't list it anywhere ... can we take the liberty to publicise this somewhere anyway?

I notice Oracle (and sleepycat before them) had a lot of fun
pointing out when Microsoft uses BDB.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-jan/o17opensource.html
  You'll find Oracle Berkeley DB "under the hood" in everything
  from Motorola cell phones, Microsoft/Groove's collaboration suite

and it seems unlikely Microsoft gave them their blessings.

Bad idea. There are companies who consider being listed as a user of a product a sort of recommendation of that technology, and accordingly

Other reasons a company might get offended by this:

* They might consider it a trade secret and a competitive advantage
  over competitors; and internally enjoy giggling when they see
  their competitors sign deals with expensive databases.

* They might have a close business partnership with Microsoft
  or Oracle that could be strained if they support other databases.

I suspect my employer would not like it announced for both reasons.

they will get really annoyed...asked to be removed from the list of
those using PostgreSQL.  ... PostgreSQL inside, it's best not to
publish the results unless you like to collect cease & desist letters.

While I agree companies are likely to get annoyed - just like fast
food companies do when you say how much trans-fats their products
contain; I'm rather curious what such a cease&desist letter would say.

Probably just a firm, but polite, request to quit it. I'd say that with a completely open piece of software like Postgres, i.e. where no commercial licensing is involved, the question is more ethical than legal. In fact, I can't think of a situation where "mind your own business" could be take more literally :)

Erik Jones

DBA | Emma®
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