Good comments Brian. I don't know what sort of personal phobias or other irrational fears were behind the drama of the last few days but it really needs to stop.
There is significant vendor interest in providing the community resources for OSCON (and other conferences) that could be used to make our presence professional and worthy of the effort put into the project. I have heard discussion of the fancy signage that we had last time, documentation to hand out, as well as (good) machines and other hardware we can use for demos or performance races. I really can't wrap my head around what sort of argument can be made against accepting these offerings! On Jul 15, 5:11 pm, Brian Aker <br...@tangent.org> wrote: > Hi! > > There has been a lot recently brought up about vendor interaction with > the project, and I wanted to add a few thoughts. > > My personal take is that seeing vendors show up and offer support/ > hardware/services is a good thing. It is a sign of both the growth and > health of the project. > > The thing about growth is that it is not always comfortable and there > can be more the a few sore points that happen along the way. > Personally? I'd like to find a way to have as much of this smoothed > over as possible. > > No one should be penalized for their efforts. There are a lot of hours > spent on memcached per week, hundreds of when you consider bug > testing, code, promotion, etc... all of this has value. There is no > one entity for this project, it is pretty mutli-company/person (which > I personally think adds to the value of it). > > All of the growth in the project should be to the benefit of everyone. > This really is a "all boats rise in water". > > So how do we get everyone participating in a manner that achieves the > end goal, which is the promotion, adoption, spread of Memcached? > > Let me throw out some material to read: > > http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/AdvocacyGuideshttp://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BoothCheckList > > Postgres has a long history of being "many vendor" and when I look > around I see them as one community we can learn from. I suspect there > are others as well but having a common license and a common > distributed identity I am wondering whether we could follow their > model (or better improve on it). > > So what should be the plan? How do we encourage people and at the same > time set a level of what is appropriate for the community at large? > > On the same token, we really need to realize and accept that people > feed their families from the use of memcached, and we shouldn't be > creating barriers which harms this. > > Cheers, > -Brian
