Re: [LAU] poll : Advertising vs Linux Audio

Patrick, another long reply. please bear with me.. On 04/22/2012 03:45 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: not really. I like the idea to support developers or musicians. It's just that advertising and SEO on linuxaudio.org is not the right way to do this. I was thinking of "business plans" in general not ads in particular. There were a couple of initiatives on the table a while back. e.g. merge with and become part of the linux-foundation - similar to what linux-printing/open-printing did. The linux-foundation has experience with handling funding, supporting developers and properly taking care of bureaucracy. There's actually quite lot of linux-audio projects, devs and users that accept donations or even make a living by selling services or products. Yet, personally I don't have any clue how linuxaudio.org can directly support those. IMHO the knowledge-exchange on LAD and LAU lists as well as LA conferences, teaching newbies, etc is what linuxaudio.org does best. It's not a business plan per se, though. A linux-audio-record-label, sponsored music-contests, video-promos etc.. would be much more suitable for the latter. Yet someone needs to take up that task -- I do prefer the avantgarde-like concerts featured at LAC and that's where my time and efforts go. If someone has incentive to do sth focused on musicians or other LA interest groups, the consortium is usually very open to proposals and does support viable initiatives. Keep in mind that a viable plan for the community must enable the community to grow and not restrict them (and that includes granting contributors the freedom to be not bothered with ads on the community site itself - although compromises can be made as long as they're according to LAO policy). And you got answers - most recently by the director of the linuxaudio Management Board himself just before you approached LAU on 04/21/2012 11:29 PM CEST Ico wrote: "... based on the majority of the consortium members the current linuxaudio.org site will remain ad-free." [1] No, you did not. You simply suggested move to a different [paid by ads] host, which is not a smart idea given the infrastructure we have (see below). Also your way of approaching the consortium is - at best - questionable. I think you owe Ico an apology for your offensive phrases and questioning his authority in [2]. Also migrating content away from lau.linuxaudio.org - a domain intended for linux-audio USERS (that you just happen to be curating) - to a .COM domain without asking the community at large and completely deleting the content from the linuxaudio.org server after the site has been migrated speaks volumes. I can completely understand that the consortium does want not continue this discussion nor put this issue on the agenda (again). [1] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/consortium/2012-April/002089.html [2] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/consortium/2012-April/002092.html http://linuxaudio.org/policy :) Let me interpret it like this: If a sponsor support our cause: "promote and enable the use of Linux kernel based systems for professional audio use" - we can link to and /advertise/ for them. A good example is your previous endeavor: http://awards.linuxaudio.org/ Commercial companies sponsor a prize for Linux-Musicians; the companies in question also directly promote audio and/or GNU/Linux. We add a link to and logo of those companies and the prize-money goes directly to the musician(s). Great. If an unrelated 3rd party wants to pay linuxaudio.org for SEO, ads or whatever - even if we could use the money to do great things for LAO - it's more or less a no go. -- At least for the time being. For that to happen, linuxaudio.org would need to become a much larger organization in order to balance commercial interest, retain its independence and handle bureaucratic issues. It'd also require revising the policy which can be only done by a majority decision of the Linuxaudio.org Management Board. On 04/22/2012 03:27 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: On average over the last year linuxaudio.org served 1.5 TBytes/month (~35-40k unique visitors per month). The last weeks (with LAC videos) we're currently around 4-5 TB and this month is not over, yet. yet, bandwidth is the cheap part. Virginia Tech currently provides linuxaudio.org with unlimited traffic, 3 hourly, 7 nightly and 4 weekly full backups of a 300GByte disk volume (soon to be extended to 500+ GB - Ico is working on that). 2GHz dual-core amd64 CPU, 2GB RAM on a XEN virtual system. Not to mention 24/7 support via phone, xmpp/jabber, email or skype with highly qualified Unix/Linux personnel (e.g. they sent us customized shell scripts to manage LVM and virtual hardware upgrades on our server. We we can review those scripts and simply run them root. The vt tech-team also helped us to debug XEN related kernel OOPS and pushed fixes upstream.) All free of charge. The only requirement is that we mention them as in the about page and/or HTML footer. - Thanks to Ico for organizing this. Equivalent infrastructure is more like 150-200 euro per month (numbers from ovh.net - but their tech-support and backup-solutions are lousy compared to vt.edu). I honestly have no idea what one would pay in the commercial world these days for services like those provided by vt.edu. Daniel James sponsors DNS and host-name registration ever since linuxaudio.org was born. Kudos to him. Sysadmin, list-moderation, web-design, wiki-despamming and general maintenance are taken care of voluntarily by various dedicated individuals. Aside from infrastructure, there's a lot of stuff going on that is really hard to quantify financially. Yet I'm pretty sure voluntary contributions and enthusiasm would drop if we have advertisements on the site and that revenue from advertisement and SEO will not be sufficient to replace that. That being said, some of your initiatives (e.g label.linuxaudio.org and awards.linuxaudio.org) are very interesting and were promising. I suggest to focus on [reviving] those rather than pushing ads in general. Cheers! robin