Re: Presentation: Adoption and Trends

Neil Conway wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > Here is a presentation I just finished for a talk in Japan.  It
> > covers:
>
> > Comments welcome.  I leave on Tuesday morning.
>
> Slide 6: How does open-source software bring "democracy" to software
> development? The core group may be benevolent, but a benevolent
> aristocracy is not a democracy by any means.

True, there are autocratic open software projects, but I was talking
more about PostgreSQL there, and the ability to take the source and make
a new distribution is democratic.  I realize it is a stretch, but the
idea of centralized control has the same advantages/disadvantage in
government and software --- that was the point I was trying to make.

> Slide 14: The list of similar projects is a little baron -- I sent a
> list of ~10 to -advocacy a little while ago which I can resend if
> necessary/useful.

Yep.  Please help me beef it up, but I am looking for ones visible
outside the open source world.

> Slide 15: Josh Berkus, despite being an all-round nice guy, is not a
> "PostgreSQL core developer" AFAIK :-)

Sure, he is, or has been for the past few months.  The developers page
has not been updated, however.

> You might want to include NetBSD among the "distributed leadership"
> projects on slide 15. Also, are you sure that calling XFree86 governed
> by a "corporate council" is fair?

Not sure.  I can remove it.  I thought of NetBSD too but it didn't seem
visible enough outside the open source world.  However, I just added it.

This presentation is an intro to open source so therefore I was hoping
for something that was visible outside open source, like Linux and
Mozilla.

> In slide 18, you might want to mention that a drawback of OSS is that
> sometimes features that developers don't find interesting (such as a
> native Win32 port or a better upgrade story) aren't implemented as
> quickly as they might be in a commercial environment.

Any ideas how to phrase that?

> There is a typo on slide 31: s/Practial/Practical/

Fixed.

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