On 2018-02-06, Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@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.
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