[maemo-community] Banners on maemo.org

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Apr 29, 2011, at 12:49, Attila Csipa wrote:

> On Friday 29 April 2011 13:10:32 you wrote:
>> This is a very, very misguided decision and ought to be entered into only
>> with consensus from the wider Maemo community.
>> 
>> Look at any Open Source project's web site, i.e. MeeGo, Fedora, Debian, you
>> won't see any banners.
> 
> ? I'm not sure I follow. Fedora is littered with RedHat and other sponsor 
> banners, MeeGo has half a dozen textual banners (supported by Novel, 
> Telefonica, etc), hell, even Debian has an ISP sponsor banner in the visible 
> section of it's very first page. IANAL, but it doesn't seem to be a problem for 
> any FOSS projects. maemo.org sported (and still does) a Forum Nokia banner on 
> the first page for years and nobody got hurt. The bottom line is - this is not 
> about ads, but cross-promotion. I'll leave the wording for the legally more 
> inclined folks, but what the Council wants is that if you have a 
> project/initiative that you think would benefit maemo.org and vice versa, cool, 
> let's do something about it, but we will not do spam ads, SEO schemes, pills, 
> and silly stuff of the sorts. To reiterate, this is nothing new, it's just that 
> there was an initative to make some more formal guidelines of what kind of 
> stuff we want there (and yes, we do get completely bogus requests/spam, which 
> we currently dismiss ad-hoc - I don't see how that's better than the 
> proposal). That said, wording clarifications and such that make the 
> goals/workings of any present or future banners are more than welcome.

The wording has to be explicit. It has to say we won't host ads, but we will host relevant sponsorship requests. That seems quite reasonable. You ought to look at how these other projects do this and what their policies are instead of re-inventing the wheel. You should also disseminate the proposal to the wider community - this _is_ an open source project whether the council likes to think so or not. From the front page: "Maemo Community is an open source community developing software around the Maemo platform."

If you're going to call for sponsorship or if sponsors are going to put banners on the site, then there has to be an obvious benefit to maemo. In the past it was Nokia who paid for the site hosting, if they're still doing that then fine. Since they founded the project they can pretty much do as they please, but if you're going to run the council as an open source body, you should have an open budget like SPI does. And you should make sure there is a consensus around your decisions to use the community property, namely maemo.org. 

How do you know that those people whose software maemo.org hosts even will allow you do host "banners"? I mean, the only reason people come to maemo.org is because of the software on their devices. That is based on the Linux kernel and the Debian packaging tools and the GNU userland, there is very little maemo on maemo.org. What about supporting those projects who have supported maemo with their free software? Or is this just a way to lay the groundwork for paid ads and pet projects?

Regards,

Jeremiah