Re: PEAR DB 1.6.0 has been released

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> writes:

>I am the education chair for a 501C3 state licensed non-profit Oracle
>user group. I post every announcement of its activities at
>c.d.o.marketplace. I don't consider this a hardship.

This is a fair point. I would argue that meetings of a user group are different because they're of interest only to people in that area - but equally, something like PEAR DB is of interest only to those who use PHP. (Even if PHP and maybe even PEAR DB are distributed by Oracle themselves, as discussed in an interesting sub-thread...)

>If someone is promoting something, even a free seminar offered by a
>non-profit, they should respect the groups enough to realize that
>those asking for help with server, tool, or other issues, doesn't
>necessarily want to read their promotional piece.

There is no clean line between technical discussion and 'promoting something'. If I recommend a poster to upgrade from 8.0 to a supported Oracle release, I am promoting the products of Oracle Corp. But I think we can agree that the case in question is when announcements are posted as the start of a new thread, rather than just mentioning some free program in answering another poster's question.

So I think you have a case for keeping free software announcements off the .misc group. On balance, I don't think I agree, because I find the threads following free software announcements in other groups such as comp.databases.sybase to be informative and useful. But the world of Oracle is bigger and I can see why you would want a harsher policy.

However, what we are discussing here is what _should_ be considered on-topic for the various groups. My original objection was about what _is_ on-topic, as specified in the charter. You labelled another poster as a spammer even though his article (in my opinion) was within the group's charter. I support your suggestion to try changing the charter to clear up the question of whether non-commercial announcements are acceptable.

-- 
Ed Avis <ed_at_membled.com>