Re: What is annoying in the flattr buttons?
Tshepang Lekhonkhobe <tshepang@gmail.com> writes:
> Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <didier@raboud.com> wrote:
>> For a simple reason, the DMUP [0]; which every user of Debian resources
>> must follow. It says (in its introduction, point 1).
>> * "Don't use Debian Facilities for private financial gain"
> I'm sure this is just a guideline of course, else the following should
> be adhered to:
> "Don't mention a book you've just written if that piece of writing
> will show up on Debian Planet, even if the book is about Debian."
Indeed, and therefore there's already been a lot of discussion on this
thread about how the boundary is fuzzy, we don't want to be too literal
about it, some amount of incidental use is fine, and so forth. But
because the boundary is fuzzy, that means we sometimes have to have these
conversations, and it means that the topic is legitimate.
I probably come to this from a slightly different perspective than some of
the people here since I work for a non-profit educational institution,
which has similar requirements around use of university facilities for
personal gain for tax reasons. If someone at Stanford used Stanford
computing facilities directly for personal financial gain, Stanford could
get into serious trouble with the US government because it's a violation
of our tax-free non-profit status.
As you would expect, just like with the Debian systems, the boundary is
fuzzy and complicated, and there's a lot of things that fall into a grey
area (note, for example, that both Yahoo and Google started as student
projects and originally ran on Stanford's network, but notice also that we
kicked both of them off our network onto their own bandwidth long before
they became companies). The university, like most places with this issue,
has guidelines that allow for "incidental use," where "incidental" is left
open to a common-sense interpretation. But there's still a real rule
there, and the university occasionally has to enforce it.
I personally felt quite uncomfortable with hosting my web site, which as
previously mentioned has some affiliate links to an on-line bookstore, on
the Stanford network even though it was on my personal hardware, and felt
much more comfortable about that once I moved my personal web site to my
own VMs hosted elsewhere.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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