Hi,
I also wrote Bruce about that.
It happens that, if you 'freely advertise' commercial solutions (rather
than they doing so by other vehicles) you will always happen to be an
'updater' to the docs if they change their product lines, if they change
their business model, if and if.
If you cite a commercial solution, as a fair game you should cite *all*
of them. If one enterprise has the right to be listed in the
documentation, all of them might, as you will never be favouring one of
them.
That's the main motivation to write this. Moreover, if there are also
commercial solutions for high-end installs and they are cited as
providers to those solutions, it (to a point) disencourages those of
gathering themselves and writing open source extensions to PostgreSQL.
As Bruce stated, then should the documentation contemplate
EnterpriseDB's Oracle functions? Should PostgreSQL also come with it?
Wouldn't it be painful to make, say, another description for an
alternate product other than EnterpriseDB if it arises?
If people (who read the documentation) professionally work with
PostgreSQL, they may already have been briefed by those commercial
offerings in some way.
I think only the source and its tightly coupled (read: can compile along
with, free as PostgreSQL) components should be packaged into the tarball.
However, I find Bruce's unofficial wiki idea a good one for comparisons.
Regards,
Cesar
Steve Atkins wrote:
On Oct 24, 2006, at 9:20 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Steve Atkins wrote:
If we are to add them, I need to hear that from people who haven't
worked in PostgreSQL commerical replication companies.
I'm not coming to PostgreSQL for open source solutions. I'm coming
to PostgreSQL for _good_ solutions.
I want to see what solutions might be available for a problem I have.
I certainly want to know whether they're freely available, commercial
or some flavour of open source, but I'd like to know about all of them.
A big part of the value of Postgresql is the applications and
extensions
that support it. Hiding the existence of some subset of those just
because of the way they're licensed is both underselling postgresql
and doing something of a disservice to the user of the document.
OK, does that mean we mention EnterpriseDB in the section about Oracle
functions? Why not mention MS SQL if they have a better solution? I
just don't see where that line can clearly be drawn on what to include.
Do we mention Netiza, which is loosely based on PostgreSQL? It just
seems very arbitrary to include commercial software. If someone wants
to put in on a wiki, I think that would be fine because that doesn't
seems as official.
Good question. The line needs to be drawn somewhere. It's basically
your judgement, tempered by other peoples feedback, though. If it
were me, I'd ask myself "Would I mention this product if it were open
source? Would mentioning it help people using the document?".
Cheers,
Steve
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