On 12-09-27, at 13:44 , Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: >> >> My main concern was to not highlight commercial support entities via a >> direct link from the home page over other types of support. >> > > That's fine. It can be an interior link. I just want to make sure it > is findable by a visitor without too much guesswork. No one is going > to be seduced into hiring a consultant based on a link they come > across while casually browsing our website. If they need this kind of > help they will be looking specifically for it. They'll either try > some path to find it from the home page. We should try to make it > relatively logical and easy to find from there. Or they'll search > Google for "openoffice consultants" or "openoffice services" or > similar. So we'll want to pay attention to keywords on that page, so > it places prominently in search results. > > -Rob
Briefly, this discussion is recovering what was discussed in OOo a few decades ago. The solution regarding "consultants" was no discrimination. Didn't work. The solution for criteria per the community council related to a) placing a listing of those offering services outside of OOo, as these were not necessarily engaged in open source work but were rather part of the ecosystem sustaining it; and b) the motive for this ecosystem was plainly profit and though that's by no means bad it did mean that the primacy of that motive over, say, the quality of the code (however determined but presumably according to nonmarket criteria). The other issue: it's a pain to maintain that page. My solution was to ask the NLCs for assistance here and to place a rule regarding advertising. The rule I drafted was never formally enacted but a compromise was put into effect and came down to no ads. I had argued for ads but distinguished from the site proper, and that location was, when in the OOo domain, at the support page, support.openoffice. I personally would really rather have a separate NGO focused on a) AOO promotion and marketing and b) ODF promotion and marketing. (Or put b before a.) The virtue of this is that it provides for this company to be something other than a nonprofit, though it could be that, e.g., a U$ 503c6 or some such. The further virtue is that it would not distract from the supposed primary aim of AOO: coding. An ancillary benefit might be that it would provide a vehicle for sympathetic collaboration with LibreOffice and other organisations engaged in ODF implementation, e.g., Calligra. However, that is something that though I might want it, and others too, it's not something that needs to be pressurized into exploding being. Louis
