Hi,
Personally I appreciate that this has been taken to the community, as
debate is always good.
Ultimately, though, I also think it should be the Consortium to decide
through it's decision mechanisms and in line with its agreed policies.
That said, following are some personal thoughts about the querelle:
1. I agree with Robin that the best way to support so-called
Linux-friendly companies is word of mouth and ultimately buy their
products, community-driven assessment.
2. Setting it at a philosophical level of Ads VS non-ads is a little
misleading.
In my humble opinion some very practical considerations should be set:
2.a. What kind of ads will these be? (10x50 GIF, adsens banner,
flash, static image, rotating logo)? How many?
2.b. What is the foreseen cost/benefit of the operation. Adding ads
to a website does have its set-up and maintainance costs: e.g. redesign
of the webpage, downtime (i.e. ad unavailability) monitoring and risk
management.
2.c. State precisely what the net income will used for, this
excludes things like "promoting linux", "making the world a better
place" and should be more to the ground such as "the revenue from these
adds will be used for buying a new server / sponsoring XXX project /
paying XX hours of YY person to write ZZ section of the website" etc.
which would probably all be in line with the scope of the linuxaudio.org
consortium,
2.d. Legal/customer relation aspects. That is, websites you are
providing ads become now your "customers" (unless you use an external
provider such as google):
2.d1. Who is in charge of the legal aspects such as contracts,
risk management etc.? Who pays for it? E.g. What if company XXX sues
linuxaudio.org because the servers blew up and linuxaudio.org went down
for 2 months?
2.d.2 Who is in charge of customer relations.
2.e. Assessment of the operation. Implement a clear strategy for
assesment of the "Ads on linuxaudio.org" operation. That is, after one
year have some measurable parameters to understand if the operation was
overall successful and should therefore continue or not, or maybe
continue with corrections. Possibly set intermediate assessment points.
3. Are there other forms of possible sponsorship available and viable?
Whay are they better/worst than ads?
4. I don't necessarily think
Hope this helps,
Lorenzo.
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