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a point on receiving membership money. i am not sure how it works in china, but i am sure you guys can figure it out. for overseas people, i suggest using paypal. if i remeber correctly, people in china can receive and withdraw money by using a paypal account. check http://www.paypal.com for details. i think US$25/year is a reasonable amount for oversea people, at least for those in north america. it's about 2-3 lunch money or a decent oil change. i am sure those in the IT field won't have problem with that. of course, people are welcome to donate more, and we can publish the names of those donate more as an incentive for honorary donors. it's fairly common overseas. for people in china, i think 100RMB is still resonable. don't get me wrong. i also have relatives in china who makes much less than 1000RMB/month. but they are not IT people, and they don't need ITPUB.
also, a clarification about membership. this membership is just a privilege for people to use the facility, it's different from tech support. banzhu's on the forums are not obligated to answer or answer correctly people's questions. it's just a gathering place for high quality people. what do you get out of it is your own problem. similar to some of the networking events in the north america.
and, about sponsorship from oracle. we can certainly try. asking for money will be good. but won't it be odd for oracle to sponsor someone who is running the system on mysql? it's a slap on its face. perhaps we can ask them for a complimentary (free) oracle license, with no tech support attached. that way, oracle can make a case out of it as well. you see, that site was so busy and mysql really couldn't scale, and look what happened after they switched to oracle. it's advertising for them (we can put a small banner at the bottom saying courtesy of oracle, etc, and they can use our case in their marketing material). by the same token, we can try to get a free license for db2 as well. perhaps approach both ibm and oracle at the same time, and leverage one against the other. i am sure we all know ibm and oracle are locked in this campaing war of whose db runs faster and more scalable. |
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