On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 05:38:46PM +0000, Giles Sirett wrote: > Chip, I've been very clear, this *is* a commercial offering, we will be > making money. ShapeBlue makes its money out of services around Cloudstack. > This is what we do to feed our kids. > > These courses have been in development for some time, we have invested time & > money in creating a structured course with classroom & online version and > also a whole set of hands-on labs. To be frank, I would expect *some* degree > of support from the community on this. I'm taking a commercial risk, creating > something that that surely can only help ACS long term > I have offered/donated 20% of the places on the Santa Clara course to the > community free of charge. > > I am really trying to make sure that we respect the rules & governance of > the project (which I have to do carefully as we are a vendor who primarily > are about CloudStack). I think we've always managed to do that (if we > haven't, I would like to be told). > > > However, if there is a training course being run in our technology , then > people should know about it; and it SHOULD be in a weekly news update IMO. > If the course was being run by somebody else, I would say the same thing.; I > would want to know about it. We should not refuse to mention it because > somebody is making some money out of it. > > > I am not asking for endorsement, I am asking to help communicate something > that people may find useful & want to purchase. >
I want to be *very* clear that I'm not against community support for what you are doing. The specific concern I had was about "endorsement" of a commercial "service" and the implication it would have for how we would treat commercial "product" announcements. However, looking back through past discussions on this topic, I believe the overriding point is that as long as we are consistent and open about inclusion, there are no problems. As stated, this is a pointer to something. In fact, I think that we should consider pointing to product announcements that include CloudStack news as well (example: we could have pointed to http://www.stackiq.com/products/rocks-cloud/ when it was announced). I'll sit down now... +1 for adding it. Thanks for being patient as I got through my own muddled thoughts in full view of everyone... ;-)
