Re: Fund raising advertisement on the DPN (Was: [Publicity-commits] r2683 - /dpn/en/current/index.wml)
On Fri, 07 Oct 2011, Francesca Ciceri wrote:
> With my Publicity & Press hat on, I completely agree with David.
I also have a publicity hat. And I know at least one other person with a
press hat who said it would be ok to announce it on the DPN...
Can we just avoid this kind of assertion? It doesn't bring much to the
discussion.
> Yes, sure it deserve a mention, but maybe is better to mention it when it
> will be published and not to pre-sell copies, isn't it?
But if the fundraising is not successful, there will be nothing to
mention. So we will have lost an opportunity to have a DFSG-free book.
What is best?
> Our intent is to inform: and sure we will inform people about another
> interesting and - I bet - useful piece of documentation when it will be
> available. But DPN is not intended to advertise commercial project, as
> the publication of your book seems to be.
As I said it really depends on the nature and the goal of the commercial
project.
Debian does not live on an island, everybody has to earn some money one
way or another. I don't agree that the mere commercial nature of something
means we should not speak about it.
If Dell started to sell computers with Debian pre-installed, would you
also not cover this?
I understand that you don't want the project to endorse this operation
with an official press release. But I disagree that we should voluntarily
hide its existence just because it's commercial.
(And I find it depressing that it's easier to promote a Debian-related project
outside of Debian than within Debian... FSF France supports the project,
LWN mentionned it, a Slashdot editor picked my story too, but
no Debian itself should not speak about it...)
> > I don't really know what you put under "sponsorship link" but we have
> > sponsorhip links at various places, and we even used to have some
> > on the main web page at the time where the web mirrors were hosted
> > by third parties.
>
> No. We *had* them: as now the web mirrors are only hosted on Debian
> machines, we have dropped them.
That's what I said. We had them and we had no major problem with this.
> The criteria here is: if the "donate" thingie is something correlated with the
> Debian Project *officially* (as, for instance, DebConf) and the money
> will go to the Debian Project, we publish it.
> If not, I'm sorry but it won't find space in our *official* Newsletter.
This is not the proper way to build an "inclusive community".
Discriminating all commercial projects that can enrich the Debian
ecosystem is counter-productive.
> That said, I want to add that as usual in the Debian Project, the last
> word need to be the one of people who actually do the work. For this reason,
> I consider David's and Alexander's opinion a little bit more relevant
> than the other's one.
I am more and more thinking that we need a project-wide discussion about
how to deal with commercial projects.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator's Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-rh/
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