On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 05:27:39PM -0700, Tim Schaub wrote: > Hey- > > Something about links to marketing pages on the OL wiki bugs me. > http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/SummerOfCode?action=diff&version=28 > > If you've got a nice demo using OpenLayers, I think the Gallery page is > an appropriate place. If you've got a project using OpenLayers, I think > it's great that our wiki references it. However, until we decide that > we're going to have a page for people selling services around > OpenLayers, I don't feel that great about links getting dropped around > the wiki. > > Anybody else have any thoughts?
Totally agree. I'm generally in favor of people making money off of OpenLayers: That's fine. But figuring out how to do that is not an OpenLayers problem, it's an external problem. I also have no problem with users mentioning their affiliation in wikipages where appropriate. Before reading this email, I edited the page to do exactly that, because I think that's a perfectly acceptable piece of information to share, if people think it's important to their mentoring in SoC. I encourage all organizations who support OpenLayers software to register for the OSGeo Service Provider directory. I see that LISAsoft, for example, is listed there already, as is TOPP, DM Solutions, etc. Any time a user asks where they can find out about commercial support for OpenLayers, I have no problem with them being directed to http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1&MUL_TECH%5B%5D=00038 , the OSGeo SPD. However, in general, commercial support for OpenLayers/corporate marketing materials are beyond the scope of the mailing list and the wiki. In order to ensure that we have an agreed upon standard for this, I'd like to suggest that we adopt a mailing list policy that recommends that offers of commercial support only be offered off the mailing list. (What you do off the mailing list is up to you.) The reason for not wanting such things on the mailing list is pretty clear: it's a matter of scale. There are more than 40 organizations listed in the OSGeo SPD as offering support: if all of them replied to every user who had a problem offering commercial support, it would by far drown out the mailing list traffic and decrease the utility of the list. Note that this doesn't apply, in my mind, to things like signatures, which often have some implicit advertistement. If there is a desire to maintain some set of providers beyond the OSGeo infrastructure, either in the OL Wiki, or somewhere else, we should discuss that, but in general, I think that just mentioning a company name is plenty of information for wiki or mailing list purposes. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
