Hi, Andreas Kusalananda Kaehaeri wrote on Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:11:54PM +0100:
> I'm quite active on the Unix & Linux Stack Exchange site > (https://unix.stackexchange.com/). They are currently asking for > "Community Promotion Ads" > (https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4765/community-promotion-ads-2018) > and since I'm fairly fond of OpenBSD I thought I'd add an OpenBSD ad > there. These ads will show up in the sidebar of the main U&L site. > > However, I thought I'd ask here before I do, just to be sure I'm not > doing anything stupid or legally wrong. Doing classical marketing - in the sense of showing self-promoting information to people who never asked for it, either independent of context or based on nothing but AI decisions about context - feels wrong in principle to me. I consider it disrespectful in general. The fact that it is becoming more pervasive and harder to avoid today than it used to be a century ago, or even a decade ago, only reinforces the point IMHO. That is my personal opinion. I'm not quite sure how other developers feel; likely opinions vary. But i can hardly remember such questions ever being explicitly discussed. There is kind of an unspoken consensus that developers don't do marketing and that there is no interest in having non-developers do marketing. Personally, i wouldn't very strongly oppose the specific thing you want to do, but i am not really in favour of it either. It doesn't seem legally wrong, it seems to me it would be covered by what is said on the page linked below. Finally, note that mentioning OpenBSD and OpenBSD-related projects in specific contexts where they can actually help with problems or tasks that people are talking about is certainly very welcome. It's just that ads for OpenBSD feel somewhat weird - they might make OpenBSD look like a commercial project, or incite other misperceptions about what the point of OpenBSD is. It is most definitely not the goal of OpenBSD to have as many users as possible. Some goals are to be as simple, functional, and secure as possible. That's a quite different thing! The normal goal of marketing is to get as many people as possible to buy or use something, even among those who would actually be happier with or better served by something else. Maybe that's why i feel hesitant about your idea. > If ok, I wonder if there's a verison-agnostic image that I could > use (like the one on the OpenBSD Wikipedia page maybe?). https://www.openbsd.org/art4.html > I do not personally gain in any way from doing this. Yours, Ingo
