Re: no commercial announcements to this list

Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote: I agree with you and Harald here. I don't agree with this however - I think the osmocom project, like all other open source projects, is a wonderful marketing channel. But the marketing is very different - the marketing is simply a byproduct of high quality development effort. Whoever does good work becomes better known, which in turn makes it more likely for them to be contacted about commercial activity. But, like Harald and Holger I too think that it's important to draw a clear line between simple advertisement "we can do things" and actual contributions "here's a patch which we've done". Alexander, the way to generate support isn't to tell people what one can do, but to let them discover it on their own. But there is also a bootstrapping problem, and I think it *is* in the interest of the open source project to help those who seek commercial products and services which contribute to the project to find the right suppliers. On the other hand nobody has a vested interest in keeping such a registry up to date, in particular getting rid of old information is difficult. The best solution may be based on the code: Someone who wants to sell products can work on visualizing how well their product works, in a way that is also generally relevant for the open source project. An automated test system is a good example, with clear red/green indication of how well a given product works over time. Of course, building test jigs for actual hardware is quite a bit more difficult (read: expensive) than for software, so it remains tempting to send simple advertisements. But please realise that advertisements do more harm than good in the long run, in the context of open source projects. I'd like to point out that I think it was a good idea for Alexander to send an email saying that he was at the conference and inviting to meet up with anyone who wanted to chat - only the blatant advertising in the email was stepping over the line IMO. //Peter