Am Sonntag, den 22.04.2012, 10:28 +0200 schrieb Robin Gareus: very well said, +1 hermann

On 04/22/2012 11:15 AM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: Not at all. "people 'round here" can take all the money they want from anyone for whatever they deem fit. but linuxaudio.org itself will have a hard time. Usually money comes with obligations and we are in no position to handle that properly. Currently there is no flow of money in or out of linuxaudio.org - it's all volunteer work and hosting is sponsored by vt.edu. certainly not. Personally, I'm averse against all forms of advertising :) robin

On 04/22/2012 12:12 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: just take it in stride. -- Your obligation as member of the management board is also to meet with the others at least once a year :) [ see 2. at http://linuxaudio.org/policy ] We're getting a bit OT here, but it's fun to get known to each other, isn't it.. google: as long as they don't mind me using Adblock, it's live and let live. -- I turned down some job offers there for various reasons. RedHat is doing a fine job. But different rules apply: linuxaudio.org is a community site, RedHat is a company. Apples and Oranges. My "ubuntu experience" is a rather sad story. I recommend to most PPL not to use Ubuntu. yes, I'd very much prefer that. There's advertisement on ardour.org ? You're free not to go there. They don't push it on you. If you choose to go and expect to see self promotion and marketing; that's great! I do enjoy visiting those events. /me does not have a TV nor Radio :) No, but I'm also yet to come across a valuable scientific or medical contribution that directly benefited from marketing or ads. My personal opinion aside: I'm in favor to maintain a reasonable approach. The freedom of the community (no user-tracking, no obligations WRT to content posted on the site, no harassment, no discrimination, etc) takes priority. We should _not_ be "completely anti advertising", but think twice before adding ads or agreeing to 3rd party conditions. We can certainly express gratitude or favor companies that support linuxaudio.org but must be careful about maintaining independence. It's not possible to genralize advertising campaigns, but online marketing techniques usually come with strings attached.. Nobody complained that you put a link to _your_ site on the pages _you_ maintain on *.linuxaudio.org - but 3rd party interests - esp paid - is questionable. probably not, but there's a big lack of manpower behind linuxaudio.org esp when it comes to bureaucracy, administration and PR. It'd be easy to subvert the medium and the message. ciao, robin

On 04/22/2012 02:27 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: I did. 4-5 times over the last 7 years. Most of the LAO crowd meets at the Linux Audio Conference but the majority of the Management Board has been absent there in recent years. [..] I tried hard to explain the position and make it clear that it's not a /knee jerk/ reaction. let me try this way: the few bucks that linuxaudio.org could make via adverstising on linuxaudio.org will - in commercial context - never be able to pay for the services linuxaudio.org provides - and not even pay for the administrative overhead. If you have a viable business plan, we're all ear. Dunno, that's a question for the management board, not me. linuxaudio.org has no treasurer, no guidelines or infrastructure to deal with donations or money. There are no established procedures how the Board needs to agree and how to deal with such funds. Besides that, a policy would need to be in accordance to the rules of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Virginia Tech (our host). Ico has elaborated on that in his email to you from 04/20/2012 02:57 AM CEST on the consortium list. with common-sense. It's in the "we're happily ignorant about it" basket :) robin

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

Yes, please gentlemen tell us about that May we eat Pineapples instead, or not ? I recommend People to learn Debian, but it's good if they ask from Ubuntu instead of Wdw$... THERE IS, in the very center of http://ardour.org/ BUT, it's not necessary a bad thing... Means, Paul is one of the rare persons to live by FLOSS, every subscriptor knows that ! (at least, I do))) /me the same for tv, but could you mention any FLOSS radio-tv ? +1 on below : Advertising, merit is not invoked in that, it's here to sell !!! Plague is not appropriated, if you see what I means, some images are too strong... Brand, one more time.... Keeping the control, yep, that's the point here ! Again, the viability and power will never been aquired by advertise, but with proofs of viability and power, from mouth to ears... Hope it'll be not ! Fred

NEVER : - animations - flashlights - pop-ups - dark on bright background or opposite - disturb user experience - make site unreadable - make site unusable If necessary DO: - make clear it is advertising - have a dedicated space for it

On Sun, April 22, 2012 5:31 pm, Emanuel Rumpf wrote: I'm not sure what the aversion to animations are. Surely we can have a lot of fun by utilising the broad range of tools and skills that we have available to us to make award winning animations... It seems strange to me that people who are so invested in digital music would dislike animated content. What would be your position if a large company wanted to pay us say $2mil to make a 30 second TV slot? -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd

On Sun, April 22, 2012 4:42 pm, Clemens Ladisch wrote: This is the part that I am most concerned with. I seek to own the channel and I expect it to be managed by the entire community or at least those who can be arsed taking part. If we get it right we will not be anyone's slave. One of the benefits we have as a community is that we are not reliant on the potential income from this project to feed our kids. More details will follow over the coming weeks... -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd

Mark Shuttelworth MUST have all the respect for all the work and money he puts in Ubuntu. As a first step (or not)... Just my 2 cents.

Am 22. April 2012 22:19 schrieb Fred <f.rech(a)yahoo.fr>fr>: Don't need advertising here. If I need something and I'm able to find it with a google or shop search ( or something as http://www.dmoz.org/ ) that's enough for me. -- E.R.

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 11:24:30AM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote: You are not alone. "Pay me and I'll deliver your message. Your message may be dishonest, partially true, overly exagerated, spreads crap with nice envelopment or simply induces people into thinking that they need something that they don't. But if you pay me, I'll be happy to spread your message whatever is it and I promise I won't even bother to question it. Thanks."

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 04:23:52PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: I won't claim that my personal, political or ideological convictions are better or worse than yours, just different. I would want, though, to say that not all people that place critics or think different are necessary misinformed or ignorant. And yes, it seems generalization is more fun... I know what founding a company means, and beign close to marketing matters during several years for good or evil. It was the knowledge gained during those years the cause of my current way of thinking, many of my ideas evolved, I became very critic with many areas of nowadays society, wrote a few articles in country-wide press, and eventually started a whole new my life. With time I became less vocal than was once, tired of fighting and stop trying to save the world, but I still think the same way. And that's my sad history. I'll be happy to provide references to prove the facts above, but on private email please. So thanks for your suggestion, but in this case reading was the cause of the oposite effect than you expected. Maybe in your case the effect was different, everyone has its own reasons. Anyways, it was only my ballot for the poll, everyone has to live with things they dislike one time or another, and I can live with that, just making use of my right to complain loudly :)

On 04/25/2012 07:58 AM, Roberto wrote: Everyone complains that companies don't support Linux, and their decision is based either on complete ignorance of linux itself, or on the comparatively small user base. That user base is small in large part because people either know nothing of linux, or have no idea that real-world usable audio. MIDI, and video programs exist. People will never find out about linux, and learn of the audio programs that exist, unless someone tells them. Another name for "telling them about it" is advertising. I understand the philosophical stance against advertising, and how some may feel it somehow is impure. Consider that this same philosophical stand for "purity" is also what gives us distros that won't include features which they, in their supposed superiority, feel are impure, such as MP3 capability. And to a large extent, as a direct result, even if people stumble across such a "pure" distro, people are turned off by it simply because they can't play their .mp3 files. Or their graphics card won't work, or whatever. Getting a larger user base will only help the linux community, and I just have to shake my head at those who complain of the small user base, on one hand, and scoff at doing anything to enlarge that user base, on the other. -- --- http://www.lateralforce.com My blog, with commentary on a variety of things, including audio, mixing, equipment, etc, is at: http://audioandmore.wordpress.com Staat heißt das kälteste aller kalten Ungeheuer. Kalt lügt es auch; und diese Lüge kriecht aus seinem Munde: 'Ich, der Staat, bin das Volk.' - [Friedrich Nietzsche]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 10:28:34AM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote: +1 -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

On Sunday, April 22, 2012 04:02:05 PM S. Massy did opine: Unforch, that doesn't pay the bills to run the server if its not 100% donated. I would modify that by making the link to that list quite visible, but the random display would be chosen to only show those companies or vendors who have actually purchased a ticket to the show by actually supporting the site with either money or materials. Set the ticket price in "kind", and if someone wants to improve his/her odds of being shown, they get to buy another ticket, doubling their odds of getting the hit. 3 tickets triples etc, but like all good things, it should expire in say 30 days per ticket. Above all, you don't want to appear to have sold out. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> Horner's Five Thumb Postulate: Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.

THAT'S IT ! a community-based "pick of the month" This will do the trick !!!

On Sunday, April 22, 2012 09:06:51 PM S. Massy did opine: I certainly can't argue against that either. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse. -- Miguel de Cervantes

22.04.2012 11:12, Folderol kirjoitti: I agree: I have nothing against advertising as such, but popups, animations (flash or otherwise) and especially 'inline' ads (intellitxt etc.) are just pure *evil* -- | me@home ~$whoami ^ ^ | "Trust me, I know what I'm doing!" | | Jouni 'Mad Max' Rinne ('x') | - Sledge Hammer | | me@home ~$man woman C " " | -------[ph34r t3h p3Ngu1n]-------- | | Segmentation fault (core dumped) | :: Last.fm user ID: l33tmmx :: |

On 04/22/2012 01:04 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: Makes no sense. We may even make enough money in If there is a need for this, then start something like the Blender Foundation, and make a decent plan which tells us why we need money and how we think we'll gain the money. Atm I think: Mo money, mo problems! :) \r

Patrick Shirkey: I don't. To be clear, I don't like advertisments and marketing that intrude on me, but I want ads and marketing for things I'm looking for. So, I'd be fine if a linux friendly company advertises on said site but not so it intrudes too much, and what is that, well it is an balancing act. ... I think that you don't run a bussiness yourself. No money in means no food, no house, and in the end, no life, you'd be dead. Regards, /Karl Hammar ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Aspö Data Lilla Aspö 148 S-742 94 Östhammar Sweden +46 173 140 57

On Sunday, April 22, 2012 09:15:13 AM Louigi Verona did opine: Now here I can add a hearty +100 to. I WANT to know who has linux compatible hardware, with gpl'd drivers that will drive that hardware to its full potential. Finding such info that is current enough to be germane when I go to the sound card display, would surely cause an uptick in that vendors business. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> I'm RELIGIOUS!! I love a man with a HAIRPIECE!! Equip me with MISSILES!!

On Sunday, April 22, 2012 05:03:14 PM Fred did opine: I wouldn't unless it didn't exist. OTOH, the last time I went shopping for a better sound card than the SoundBlaster 16 I had at the time, I wasn't even aware of that site. So I bought an Audigy2 Value, with a 24 bit dynamic range, muchly improved over the SB16. Nothing compared to some that is available, usually winders only drivers though, if you bring enough sheckles to the register today. See, it does pay to advertise a URL such as that occasionally. Its the first time I've heard of it since 5 or so years. And that mention is the sort of advertising I tolerate very well indeed. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> Nobody ever died from oven crude poisoning.

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Louigi Verona wrote: Linux audio oriented ads? Have I traveled into a parallel universe while I was asleep? :) Just audio ads would not suffice? That's something one could easily supply via buysellads.com and the like. Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

Le 22/04/2012 14:53, Louigi Verona a écrit : You got it Louigi, does the media have any power on the advertiser, when the last one pays for the message ?

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: Then you should know that $50 proposal was the worst kind of bullshit :) I'm all ears :) Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

So, are you telling us, stupids basic users the truth of money world ??? Don't you think Linux comes from another approach of living ???? If I read it correctly, it was not mentionned, see 3 quotes before... Maybe because of the FLOSS principles ??? I have A LOTS (yes with an S because many) respect to your work for Free IT, because your name was one the first and very mentionned when I started to focus on Linux. That said, and I don't come back in respect level be sure, don't you think life made you forget some ? What you purpose with all that commercials is NON SENSE with FLOSS. Please, tell us on this subject, and about your plan, please. Fred

I love free software and almost everything about it but I fear that this kind of mindset that "all advertising is to be avoided" is why Linux Audio will never become as big a thing as it deserves to be. Patrick's example of musicians marketing themselves struck a chord (unforeseen pun) with me, as it's exactly right: My band has been "hoping that people will come to our gigs" for the longest time but hope alone doesn't tell people that there are five guys playing some funky music in town, so now we're putting some effort into getting us out there. Then there's a ton of really amazing creative people on YouTube who make most (if not all) of their living from advertising. Advertising that allows them to turn their passion into a living; hell, I wouldn't say no to that. We have to be reasonable about this whole thing. I'd say that controlled non-evil marketing can actually improve people's lives in a variety of ways. Best Wishes, Kevin On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Fred &lt;f.rech(a)yahoo.fr&gt; wrote:

Still I miss-like advertising, . . . but to be honest, in fact, advertising pays already the bill for the most open source project hosts. At least on Sourceforge and github. So indeed it is a reasonable question witch with Patrick comes up here. My first reaction was the same then the one from the most users here, but after a bit research I found out that I already benefit from advertising ( hosting at Sourceforge), and next to me, nearly all open source projects without a own (domain) host. Viewing at this fact, it will be just the next step to take the advertising under the own hut and generate some income from it, witch could be used to improve the situation of linux audio. Still I didn't like this Idea, but . . .

We're (at least) 2 !

Le 23/04/2012 02:06, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano a écrit : Fernando do have a pertinent point of view (of course!). Now, if we run the hypothesis to the paranoïac level : it could happened that LAO goes out of the .org domain, say to .com one. Then, people driving it could not find enough advertisers to pay the bills, and then LinuxAudio.com could just close. Of course it's a bit excessive as a description ! (Or not, viewing the financial health of the whole system ?) Anyway, Patrick asked for feedback, and had most advices not centered in his way to see the situation. I think it's a good thing that LAO is driven by volunteers, and out of commercial circuits. And of course it doesn't forbid anybody to make money with his LA productions. Means, Libre software is the point at LAO (if I understand it correctly), not bussiness ! If you add advertising you go into the business world (not to say it's evil, but different) Fred

Le 23/04/2012 13:00, Patrick Shirkey a écrit : It could be instructive to have Paul Davis advice on this item ?

On Mon, April 23, 2012 1:22 pm, Paul Davis wrote: Ouch! One of the few people who has managed to make a semblance of financial return from the Linux Audio platform (well, most of the income comes from the mac port really ;-P is not interested in advertising or do you just think it is a foregone conclusion and therefore there is no need to waste time discussing it? -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd

On Monday 23 April 2012 07:33:37 Paul Davis wrote: Obviously it is adding one lump of sugar to the morning tea!!! Just my 2 cents to this discussion... Arnold

I am reluctant to say more on the topic, but what I would say is that it is very weird to me that people in this thread consider money "evil", as if we are in the middle ages. Money is not an evil mystical power and I do not see how money can "spoil" things. I understand how "proprietary" approach is evil for a Linux community and agree with that, but money itself? As long as the ads are designed nicely and are not intrusive and are on the topic, especially if it is about good audio and midi hardware that works with GNU/Linux, I just fail to see any issues. Louigi.

My comments. On 4/22/12, Patrick Shirkey &lt;pshirkey(a)boosthardware.com&gt; wrote: Among other things it is a matter of taste. Also, music and animation have little in common in essence. On 4/23/12, Lorenzo Sutton &lt;lorenzofsutton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I believe that, on the contrary, this is a philosophical question. It is very serious and should not be dismissed as inane. We are talking about freedom. On 4/23/12, Patrick Shirkey &lt;pshirkey(a)boosthardware.com&gt; wrote: Indeed, there are also young people with regular jobs who live with their parents and are happy to have such a community, where you can give everything away for free without someone saying "you can make money off of that." As Fernando said, this thread concerns linuxaudio.org. Channels for business can be run elsewhere. The community inherently supports everybody by making available tools and knowledge to those who have any desire to know or to do. There is absolutely no reason to draw the conclusion that academia is the only thing driving "us." On 4/23/12, Louigi Verona &lt;louigi.verona(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: As many have pointed out, deciding on "designed nicely, [...] not intrusive and are on the topic" requires a lot of politics. As well, if you find a midi controller or card that works well for you and send a message to LAU saying so, you will find that typing said controller or card name together with linux into a web search engine will bring this message up in a week or so. This is a very effective way of promoting things. On 4/23/12, Andreas Kuckartz &lt;A.Kuckartz(a)ping.de&gt; wrote: OK

On 23/04/12 20:47, Egor Sanin wrote: [...] I did not say there is not a philosophical question nor did I dismiss it as insane. I said that posing it in binary form Ads VS non is misleading. In fact I think some of the apparently more 'practical' points I was asking about do have philosophical free-software-linked implications. Hope this is a little more clear now. Lorenzo.

On 04/23/2012 04:00 AM, Patrick Shirkey wrote: I'm specifically talking about linuxaudio.org, not the global linux audio community. Correct. It is fantastic to work in such a community. But that does not predict the future. I would think you underestimate how money can change people and communities (for the better and for the worse). I think the question originally asked about adding advertising to linuxaudio.org _specifically_. That is what I answer in this thread. No more. No less. You ask about something very specific ("linuxaudio.org") and then apply my answers to the world ("linux audio" - note the omission of org). Please don't do that, that is not what I wrote, not what I meant. Of course advertising has a place in commercial linux audio sites. If those sites want that, then they should use that resource. And then users (and the world) will or will not flock to them. -- Fernando

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 03:33:56PM -0400, S. Massy wrote: There's advertising and advertising. There are some forms I'd happily accept in some circumstances (e.g. ads for pro audio equipment in a specialised journal) and there are some forms I'd never accept - being forced to listen to ads in a restaurant for example). And I certainly don't want them in a context where I'm searching for factual information rather than opinion. There's a good reason why e.g. Wikipedia wants to remain free of ads. A lot has to do with the integrity of who provides the information on a channel that is sponsored by commercial advertising. When I started reading 'Studio Sound' 40 years or so ago, it had very strict editorial policies. At that time they also published real equipment reviews (based on actually measuring and testing the items being reviewed) rather the subjective blablah and personal impressions that are presented as a review today. I remember that this frequently resulted in conflicts with advertisers whom often cancelled their inserts as a result. Today you'd be hard pressed to find any journal that keeps up such standards. Or a commercial TV network that has a critical 'consumer interest' program. Advertising has corrupted almost everything, and the web has multiplied the effect thousandfold. That alone is IMHO reason enough to oppose it. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 01:59:50AM +0200, Patrick Shirkey wrote: Yes and yes. But it's also very clear that if the existence of such a journal (in whatever form) depends on advertising only, it can't be critical of the products being advertised. You'd need some income from your readers as well to remain even marginally independent. And there's the problem: most people today are quite prepared to have their souls sold as cannon fodder to advertisers in exchange for something 'free', even if what they get in return is 99% junk. They are not prepared to pay for information. I find that a bit hard to believe, given its current contents and history. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

Hi Fons I don't really get your point. This thread is about the linux audio community (represented by linuxaudio.org) advertising IT'S SELF, either on linuxaudio.org or other sites/Journals, isn't it? I'd like to spend some words on that. On Mo, 2012-04-23 at 21:05 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote: That's certainly true. I would certainly prefer SOME LOWPROFILE advertising in some journals/magazins (like Keys, Recording (in germany) etc). But it depends all on the form. I hate ads which are just made of buzzwords (buy our fantastic, superior, strong, adavanced, superdooper thing). Even if we cant afford that much space for ads, we have to keep them simple and non-buggering. In my opinion this direction of advertising, or better said, the design process of the ads could be even beneficial to the community in that it would help bring consensus to the question what Linux Audio is and what distinguishes it from other rather closed audio ecosystems. Even if we dont place the ads in the end! This may not be a relevant aspect now, but still interesting to discuss . Now to the other direction of advertising (ads of others (linux friendly vendors) on linuxaudio.org). I understand your point, but I disagree. The example you state is flawed, since there is a fundamental difference between 'Studio Sound' ,which relies on revenue partly generated by ads, and the Linux audio community, which does not rely on anything other than the commitment of its members. The independency of the LAC from external vendors prohibits those vendors from influencing the decision processes in the LAC. And yes, I know that LAC wouldn't be strictly financially independent (costs of host for linux-audio.com, mailinglist etc). But since the vast majority of the developers in the LAC aren't on the paylist of such vendors the above statement still holds. Ads from external vendors can then be regarded just as a plus, but not a must be as for 'Studio Sound'. Regards, Gerald

On Mon, April 23, 2012 1:48 pm, Dan S wrote: Sure, I know that there are plenty of people who agree with Robin. I am wondering how many people feel that there is room for advertising and it turns out that I am not the only person who thinks there is a place for it. You may have missed some of the earlier thread on the Consortium list where a couple of people did say pretty much exactly what I wrote and a bit more than that too. If you had been around here long enough you would pretty much expect that there was gonna be a lengthy debate on the topic ;-P Also that I have a certain provocative style when I want to. IMO it's what makes this list so interesting. So many bright people with so many points of view who are not afraid to share their opinions with anyone who cares to read. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd

To me advertising is a strong signal, that the product is junk. Why else would one have to spam me with that ? Advertising is a further _ misconception _ of the commercial world. Companies should rather spend their money by supporting things which are _ valuable _ to mankind or single person. Donate wikipedia, sponsor open software, support development of poorer countries, .... Possibilities are endless. -- E.R.