Hi all; I wanted to send out an email here with suggested guidelines for mentioning paid services on this list. In general I personally think there is a place for this here, but I don't think any of us want every request for help to be answered only with offers for paid help. So I figured I would offer some thoughts and guidelines for comment and see what people think.
One of the important features of an open source community is the ability of people to find service providers that can meet their needs so that they don't have to do everything themselves. One aspect of helping users out may be to suggest paid services from time to time. The main goal of these guidelines is to ensure we keep things reasonable. Here are a few proposed Do's and Dont's..... DO: * Feel free to offer paid services to those who need it, integrated into other helpful tips. Things like "Here are some ways you can get going.... On the other hand, if you'd like paid hosting, we can set it up, and host it for you" is a good thing. It gives a user a few options and the user can then decide what to do. * Participate in the community in a wide variety of ways. Users are generally happier to hire people with track records in the community than those who simply use the community to only advertise their services. * If you want to advertise your paid services in an email signature, by all means go for it. DON'T * Reply to every request for help with an offer to help for a fee. * Limit your participation in the community to offering paid help. * Be uncivil, disrespectful to the rest of the community, etc. One aspect of keeping a lot of this on the list is that it helps users out by ensuring some transparency and providing a wide range of options for going forward. What do people think? Any additional guidelines? Do people like these or do people think these are the wrong direction? Best Wishes, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-users
