[maemo-community] Banners on maemo.org

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

Can you be explicit? What part do you disagree with? That Maemo is not largely Debian?

On May 16, 2011, at 15:08, Randall Arnold wrote:

> We'll have to agree to strongly disagree on the topic, Jeremiah (with the exception of DEX).  And the council has been fully transparent; communications have been forthcoming and and any oversights quickly addressed.
>  
> Randy
> (sorry for top-posting.  Frigging Ovi)
> 
> From: Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com>
> To: List for community development <maemo-community at maemo.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 7:20 AM
> Subject: Re: Banners on maemo.org
> 
> 
> On May 1, 2011, at 13:47, Randall Arnold wrote:
> 
> > Maybe I'm just thick in the head, Jeremiah... but I don't quite get your position.  Seems like an overreaction to what's proposed.
> > 
> > No one is talking about commerce here.  For now it's community contests and the like.  I'd agree if the discussion was about becoming a web store, but we're just formalizing a very basic banner program.
> > 
> > But rather than just argue I'd like to know how you would approach something like the MeeGo coding contest.  Are you against ANY sort of maemo.org advertising for it, or just banners?  Or do you disagree with the contest itself?
> 
> To be clear - I'm all for a Maemo coding contest. I am totally against advertising on the Maemo site. 
> 
> And lets be honest, we are talking about commerce here. The banner is a style explicitly associated with advertising. Even if the current banners are not being monetized it is a short step to that happening.  If Maemo were something original, if it weren't built on Debian and Debian's social contract as well as the Debian tools and Free Software, I'd say "go ahead, do as you please." But Maemo isn't original, it is almost wholly derivative. Taking someone else's software and putting banners all over it is a questionable practice in my mind. 
> 
> If the current council wants Maemo to become a commercial entity it needs to make sure it communicates that in no uncertain terms. It also needs to return changes back from Maemo to Debian to be in compliance with the GPL. There is a project for this called "DEX" and I strongly advise the council and all members of Maemo to look into it and participate. This project was created explicitly for Debian derivatives like Maemo. Canonical's CTO is actively moving patches from Ubuntu back to Debian through DEX. Maemo should do this too.
> 
> I think the council needs to be more transparent about its intentions, statements like "even Maemo itself is not completely and specifically open source" are wrong and misleading. This is what leads many to believe that the banners are a step on the road to ads on the maemo.org site. 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jeremiah
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