Re: PEAR DB 1.6.0 has been released

On 27 Feb 2004, ed.prochak_at_magicinterface.com wrote:
> Galen Boyer <galenboyer_at_hotpop.com> wrote in message
> news:<uwu69g7c4.fsf_at_standardandpoors.com>...
>> On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, damorgan_at_x.washington.edu wrote:
>>
>> > All SPAM is bad spam. I don't care if you are giving it away
>> > for free. I don't care if you personally show up, install
>> > it, configure it train on it, and then give me a check for
>> > $50: It is still spam.
>>
>> I'm on the fence on this one. What is different from what
>> this guy posted and what Jonathan Lewis posts every month?
>
> Let's see,
> Jonathan posted only in one group at a time (I did not find any
> multiposts.)
> His Ads were ORACLE related and posted in ORACLE groups

Yes. Jonathan's monthly postings where he talks about the FAQ aren't considered spam but they do very much promote a website. They actually promote people leaving the newsgroup to work on that site (or at least they did). Of course, the sole purpose of the work on this website is to help out this group and Oracle professionals in general, but I'm conveniently leaving this out for sake of discussion. ;-)

> This guy posted in multiple discussion groups, none related to
> his product announcement. None of the groups were .announce,
> .forsale or .marketplace.

This is the main issue. Not that he was trying to make money. How could he have been. His issue is that he posted to anything and everything database related. My debate is with the first flavor of these. I definitely was annoyed by the plethora of newsgroups he decided to multi-post to.

>> Sure, Jonathan is a great contributor, and well respected, but
>> he is "advertising" a site. Is it so different, or is every
>> posting's "Spam rating" to be analyzed on a case-by-case
>> basis. I would never call Jonathan's postings spam, but I
>> also have a hard time truly distinquishing that from the
>> original posting in this thread.
>>
> Now I think we did discuss Jonathan's posts and the preferred
> place for them is still the marketplace group. But his posts in
> the other ORACLE groups have been tolerated since he does
> CONTRIBUTE to those groups. Has the OP, Analysis&Solutions
> (info_at_analysisandsolutions.com) contributed anything here?
>
> Well a google search in c.d.oracle.* shows only 4 posts by that
> email, one is the original PEAR advert, the other three were
> all Questions about date formatting. So I conclude that he
> contributes NOTHING to comp.databases.oracle.*

Well. This is where I still have the question. What if someone posts alot and offers alot of help but they also attach a little URL showing the book they have. Is this so different than someone just posting a URL? Tom Kyte used to be a regular contributor here and will be again, I'm sure, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that he does this almost as advertisement. This wouldn't bother me one bit and I quite appreciate the idea. I bought Tom's book as well as Jonathan's book because of the great help I saw others getting (as well as my own personal help). As far as I was concerned, I almost "owed" it to them. I also purchased any of the books from the free software society that I might have occasion to read. Didn't need to, cause I read it for free on my computer, but I use Emacs so much, I felt I "owed" it to them.

Sure, we all do this newsgroup thing out of the goodness of our hearts and the genuine love of the technology we are working with, but I also will have on my resume a little snippet like, "active contributor to such and such group". I do this so someone might go look me up and judge for themselves whether I could fit in on a particular team. Aren't I being financially motivated to post? Might I have a hidden agenda? Well, actually it has a very positive affect. Because I know people can look me up, I try to stay as professional as possible. Even in the patriots newsgroups. :-)

> What he contributes to open source movement is a separate
> issue.
>
> And I think I am consistent here. I would chatise the Pope if
> he posted his newest Encyclical in the oracle group, because it
> would be off topic, even if the tile of the encyclical was
> something like "St. John: ORACLE of the New testament".
>
>> About a year ago, I had embarked on building an open source
>> Oracle extension to Emacs to allow for dynamic query building
>> within Emacs by interacting with metadata from Oracle. I
>> never finished it, but had I actually published it to the Open
>> source community, I certainly would have let people in this
>> group know. Would I have been chastised for that?
>
> Galen, you are also well respected in these groups. But I think
> you answered your own question. It would have been an ORACLE
> related product. Judging from you past posts, I would expect
> that, even if you posted an advert in all the oracle groups,
> you would NOT post it in c.d.db2 or c.d.postgresql I think you
> are too intelligent to do that.

Well, thanks, and yes, the OP totally errored by multi-posting. I also think he chose groups that had no reason to see the announcement, like this Oracle group. Leaves a large doubt in my mind about the quality of his open source product as well.

I do know that, personally, I'm not interested in the OP's product for the main reason that the poster was so oblivious to newsgroup charters. But, I disagree with the accusations of his financial motives that many posters were posting.

-- 
Galen Boyer