Re: PEAR DB 1.6.0 has been released
Not a technical thread: it's an off-topic argument about Usenet etiquette following an announcement of PEAR DB 1.6.0. Daniel Morgan argued that any unsolicited product/download announcement is spam, even if free, and tried to distinguish it from posts by respected contributors like Jonathan Lewis, who only mention their work while answering real questions. Brian Peasland pointed out Morgan had himself plugged his university courses, and Morgan apologised. Others joked about Informix contributors plugging IIUG utilities. No technical problem or resolution is recorded.
Auto-generated by DrWatson from the posts below — may be imperfect; read the full thread.
On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, damorgan@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? 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. 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 Boyer
Galen Boyer wrote: > On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, damorgan@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? I will gladly answer that one. Jonathan posts in response to posts by other people asking for help solving a problem or requesting clarification. Not once has he just posted marketing in and of itself. Not once has he referred anyone to his company as the solution to a problem. Not once has he said "come take my class for the answer." Jonathan may use a line or two more than I and others do to indicate what he does and who he is but he isn't posting purely, or I suspect even incidentally, in the hope of make a sale or driving someone to his web site so he can sell them something. A free product or give-away to get people to come to your for-profit site is marketing at is most basic level. "Come on down to our used car dealership and we will give you a toaster" is marketing. So is "Come to our web site and download SPAM-DB 1.6 for free." In both cases the motive is transparent. The DB2 and Informix groups have their rules and they should be respected. The Oracle group's rules should be too. And if spammers aren't made to pay a price for what they do it just encourages them to spam more and for others to do so too. You really don't want me, and every other consultant, posting our advertising here. Really! -- Daniel Morgan http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)
> Not once has he said "come take my class for the answer." But it is ok for you to say it????? See: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=daniel+morgan+university+take+class&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=1064616994.219921%40yasure&rnum=3 I'm not sure you want to use this particular argument..... Cheers, Brian -- =================================================================== Brian Peasland dba@remove_spam.peasland.com Remove the "remove_spam." from the email address to email me. "I can give it to you cheap, quick, and good. Now pick two out of the three"
Brian Peasland wrote: >>Not once has he said "come take my class for the answer." > > > But it is ok for you to say it????? See: > > > http://groups.google.com/groups?q=daniel+morgan+university+take+class&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=1064616994.219921%40yasure&rnum=3 > > > I'm not sure you want to use this particular argument..... > > > Cheers, > Brian I'd like to make an excuse like "I don't get paid by the student" (true) or the University has turned people away 4 years out of 4 from the program so more applicants makes no difference (also true). But truly they would be lame so I apologize. -- Daniel Morgan http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)
Daniel Morgan wrote: > But truly they would be lame so I apologize. Not as lame as your justification... >:o) -- "C'est pas parce qu'on n'a rien ' dire qu'il faut fermer sa gueule" - Coluche
Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com> wrote in message news:<uwu69g7c4.fsf@standardandpoors.com>... > > 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? No more than Art gets castigated when he tags "Download utils2_ak from the iiug website" to his messages. But then Art does it for the kudos.* ;-) Malc *(1) homophonic spelling of Sir Clive Sinclair's 32-bit operating system running on a 16-bit chip with an 8-bit bus. *(2) Feeling one gets when posting "Hey Art, I found a fatal bug in that awk function of yours on myshcema line 5237"