Steve,

First - I appreciate the openness (and the link!).  Steve and I have gone a few rounds in the past 5 years but in the last 6 mos. SSC and ApexSQL (Steve, Kevin and myself) really seemed to be in a good groove and 2007 was looking to be a good year of collaboration.  I haven't always agreed with Steve but we managed to hash things out and I felt he was at least advocating for his site - not another vendor.  Our biggest incident was my complaining about Red-Gate several years ago on reviews.  We got thru it although it left an indelible impression on me as to the influence Red-Gate was trying to wield on the site.  To SSC's credit they managed to stiff arm Red-Gate on the majority of these attempts - most notable was the offer to pay the site to displace competive ads.  This was courageous since I know SSC wasn't rolling in green at the time and could have used the windfall - it would have been real easy to take this deal and outside of SSC, Red-Gate, myself and a few other vendors no one would have known.  Not sure who was involved in the decision, what the vote was etc - but the end result was that they erred on the side of ethics.  Those are actions, not words - and they mean a lot.

As a side note - my biggest thrill on this site was the occaisonal time when Steve stuck it to Microsoft (i.e. why upgrade to SQL 2005?).  I think I sent him congratulatory emails each time!   So Steve has an estabilished pedigree of independence.

But now - it's a different world.  I'm going to try and keep Steve out of my gunsights as he's not the protagonist here.  And I hope he doesn't get caught up in the cross fire.  My advice bro - the same as they told me in the Army "keep your head down until the Boom Boom stops".

Having said that, I wanted to comment on some things Steve said

As to your comment "As it turned out, everyone was great and willing to give Red Gate the benefit of the doubt that they had no ulterior motive. " I'm not sure about your study group but Sean McCown says almost exactly the opposite from his stint at PASS

"Red-Gate says they intend to keep it as a community site and grow it as much as they can. However, they also plan to use the membership list. I didn't ask for what purpose, because why would I? We all know they're talking about marketing. And I suppose that's their right because they bought the site, but I know they're going to lose a lot of users over it. People don't want to be cold called by anyone. Without exception, everyone I talked to said that they're worried about how things will change with a vendor in charge. "

Feedback to me is running very strongly against - so I guess it might be who you hang with or what people want to tell you directly.  I would say skeptism is growing - now that we know Red-Gate plans to continue to run their newsletter ads (despite removing competitors) and also plans to review their own and competitor tools.  I would re-survey these people and ask them again what they think with this addition news/context.  It seems the honeymoon is ending for a lot of people.

As for this comment

"We are planning to pull advertising, at least most of the ones on the site and most of the ones in the newsletter. I'm not sure if that's a good idea because I think it's important for you to be able to find and learn about third party tools and it's important for vendors to be able to inform you of their new products."

Well, what Red-Gate has indicated is that the most of ads they plan to pull are competitor ads.  And the most of the ads they plan to keep are their own!  Funny how it worked out that way.  

Tony Davis on Simple-Talk

"Buying SSC was a business decision and Red Gate is looking to make a return on that investment. It's true that, in the SSC newsletter, you will no longer see competitor advertising but will continue to see Red Gate tools. How big of a downside that is will be for the community to decide."

Ahhh - pretty big I would imagine unless of course you are Red-Gate.  Even Steve here is publicly expressing his concern that it might not be a good idea.  Add his voice to the growing chorus of public and private murmoring about this and I think we're seeing some movement of perspectives on this issue.

anyway - I was gonna give up on this a couple days ago (as I have a real job, kids etc!) but I started getting a lot of calls and emails of support telling me to keep fighting and thanking me for lending a voice to the "resistance".  If I'm going to live in North Carolina I guess I gotta have Tar on my Heels.  So until I'm totally satisfied (and we're getting farther away from this than closer with recent Red-Gate announcements) I'm going to continue to pound away on this issue.  If you feel strongly about independent media as I do - help spread the word.