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Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Wed Nov 13 17:57:01 UTC 2013


Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> > I admit I'm extremely allergic to all kinds of
> > spam/advertisements/marketing, and my view might be a bit more extreme
> > than others.  Anything that any vendor can ever hope to achieve by
> > sending SPAM/UCE/UBE to me is that I get upset and will intentionally
> > penalize him by not buying from him because he has sent me unsolicited
> > mail.
> 
> I am allergic to this as well. Just to test it I went to the asterisk
> website and looked how many times I need to click to end up on the
> digium website.
> 
> I don't want osmocom to become like that and I think your reaction was
> the right one.

I agree with you and Harald here.


> The osmocom project is not a sales/marketing channel...

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




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