On 2018-02-06, Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > 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 > >
Well said on all counts, I totally agree.
