[LAU] poll : Advertising vs Linux Audio

Lorenzo Sutton lorenzofsutton at gmail.com
Mon Apr 23 09:24:39 UTC 2012


Hi,

Personally I appreciate that this has been taken to the community, as 
debate is always good.
Ultimately, though, I also think it should be the Consortium to decide 
through it's decision mechanisms and in line with its agreed policies.

That said, following are some personal thoughts about the querelle:

1. I agree with Robin that the best way to support so-called 
Linux-friendly companies is word of mouth and ultimately buy their 
products, community-driven assessment.

2. Setting it at a philosophical level of Ads VS non-ads is a little 
misleading.
In my humble opinion some very practical considerations should be set:
     2.a. What kind of ads will these be? (10x50 GIF, adsens banner, 
flash, static image, rotating logo)? How many?
     2.b. What is the foreseen cost/benefit of the operation. Adding ads 
to a website does have its set-up and maintainance costs: e.g. redesign 
of the webpage, downtime (i.e. ad unavailability) monitoring and risk 
management.
     2.c. State precisely what the net income will used for, this 
excludes things like "promoting linux", "making the world a better 
place" and should be more to the ground such as "the revenue from these 
adds will be used for buying a new server / sponsoring XXX project / 
paying XX hours of YY person to write ZZ section of the website" etc. 
which would probably all be in line with the scope of the linuxaudio.org 
consortium,
     2.d. Legal/customer relation aspects. That is, websites you are 
providing ads become now your "customers" (unless you use an external 
provider such as google):
         2.d1. Who is in charge of the legal aspects such as contracts, 
risk management etc.? Who pays for it? E.g. What if company XXX sues 
linuxaudio.org because the servers blew up and linuxaudio.org went down 
for 2 months?
        2.d.2 Who is in charge of customer relations.
     2.e. Assessment of the operation. Implement a clear strategy for 
assesment of the "Ads on linuxaudio.org" operation. That is, after one 
year have some measurable parameters to understand if the operation was 
overall successful and should therefore continue or not, or maybe 
continue with corrections. Possibly set intermediate assessment points.

3. Are there other forms of possible sponsorship available and viable? 
Whay are they better/worst than ads?

4. I don't necessarily think

Hope this helps,
Lorenzo.




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