Re: PEAR DB 1.6.0 has been released

Greetings:

Wow. I didn't expect to start such a tempest. I do apologize. At the same time, as the Captain said: "What we've got here is failure to communicate." Allow me to clear up why I posted my announcement here.

First, some definitions...

PHP

---
PHP is a free, open source, widely used scripting language that is similar 
to PERL and Python.  It is commonly used for other open source projects.  
Here's the official spiel:

"PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is 
borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific 
features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to 
write dynamically generated pages quickly." -- 
http://php.net/faq.general.php

PEAR
----
PEAR stands for "PHP Extension and Application Repository."  It is a 
framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.  -- 
http://pear.php.net/

PEAR DB
--------
PEAR DB is PEAR's database API / abstraction layer.  As my original 
announcement said, it provides "an object oriented API with common methods 
of accessing thirteen of PHP's database driver extensions."  Oracle is one 
of those extensions.  -- http://pear.php.net/package/DB/


So, to bring all of the definitions together...  PEAR DB is a free package 
that can be used by developers who need to produce web and/or command line 
scripts that interact with Oracle databases.

That said, here's why I chose .misc and .server under the 
comp.databases.oracle hierarchy.  When deciding which groups to post to, I 
did a search for which groups had prior discussions about using PHP with 
Oracle and these two came up with the most mentions.  This indicated that 
people in these groups had discussed these matters and that said people, 
and those coming in the future, might be interested in this bit of news.

If we're going strictly by charters, it could be argued that .tools would 
have been a better location since it covers "tools... designed to work 
with Oracle applications."  But .marketplace's "commercially oriented 
topics" of discussion does not seem appropriate since this isn't a 
commercial product.

One posters's alluded to my announcement being a free teaser to suck you 
into a product for which one would eventually have to pay.  If the 
definitions above didn't disprove that notion clearly enough, it's time to 
emphatically state PHP, PEAR and PEAR DB are, have been and always will be 
free, open source projects.

All of this aside, I found it amusing that individuals so concerned with 
propriety didn't remove c.d.ibm-db2, c.d.informix and c.d.o.server from 
their follow-ups and wound up flooding those groups with a very lengthy 
discussion.  I hope others did as well.

Please accept my apologies for stepping on the toes of anyone who
disagreed with my decision. (I, nor you, are perfect arbiters of
propriety.)  If you continue to disagree with me, feel free to ignore /
kill file my future posts.

Thanks for your time,

--Dan

-- 
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