great piece of informayion

Although Red Gate run Simple-Talk and claim not to interfere editorially it still has articles plugging their software and I have not seen mention of any other vendors tools.

The purpose of a business is to make money, pure and simple. Steve, Andy and Brian's motivation seemed to be more altruistic as they genuinely wanted a community first and ran advertising to pay the bills.

However, now Red Gate are running the show you will never see comment or advertising from any other vendor as it costs them more than it earns them. Maybe the community don't want to know about new tools but I bet they want their tools to be kept cutting edge. The only way this happens is through competition which is looking less likely as Red Gate will make sure no one sees the competition.

I think it's a great day for Steve, Brian and Andy but a sad day for the community as a whole.

thx for blogging on this. It's bad news for the sql community.

Red-Gate has already removed banners that advertised competive discounts to their products. So much for "not changing a thing"!

http://www.apexsql.com/blog/2006/11/sad-day-for-sql-server-community-loss.htm

let's hope the community can mobilize in time to reverse this anti-competive deal. the storm clouds are just starting to form on this issue.

I think you'll be in a much better position to comment once you've talked to Red-Gate. Why do so beforehand?

Full disclosure, I've written for SQL Server Central, Simple-Talk, and I'm a "Friend of Red-Gate."

That said, this whole thing makes me nervous. SSC is one of the go-to sites on the web for SQL knowledge. It's fun & active. You can get questions answered there. I hope it remains so, but we'll see. Red Gate, as a company, is pretty cool. However, they are a company first and a publisher & community member second. We may see decisions from them that are not in SSC and the communities best interest. Oh well, what can you do?

I think taking over a public site by a technology with stakes in the game is a bad idea, no matter how noble the intentions. One can only speculate at the motivation for the move, but it suspiciously sounds like a marketing positioning move.

There are some things that should be left to a community and not influenced by marketing decisions.

It's very interesting to see so many popular sites being sold off. It's basically sqlteam left standing eh? hehe