I agree with you that advertising sucks for getting work done, and that's why 90% of technical conferences with endless vendor pitches suck. Pitches for open s

I agree with you that advertising sucks for getting work done, and that's why 90% of technical conferences with endless vendor pitches suck. Pitches for open source stuff can obviously also suck just as badly, and be even more clumsily delivered. Let's not construe a non-technical statement about an open source product as "intellectual discourse". It's an advertorial statement of opinion, not a fact. The CouchDB marketing department may not have approved the message, but, for whatever reason, the guy is trying to get people to try some CouchDB. That's an attempt at persuasion/marketing/advertising. Hence, the relevance of other attempts that use similar means, and the ridiculousness of anyone getting worked into a lather about someone doing it. Of course, must people don't like sitting through commercials. It's even stupider to pay to go to a conference so you can listen to them.