___/ On Sun 10 Sep 2006 16:52:23 BST, [ David Chait ] wrote : \___
| ----- Original Message -----
| From: "Charles"
|
||> Live and let live is quite a bit different from "let you use my website
|| for your gain".
||
|| Eh. <shrugs> WordPress's default blogroll links have the same effect
|| (times a few hundred thousand), and I don't think anybody would begrudge
|| Matt that.
The blogroll is a well-deserved reward that benefits the
owners of the linked sites /directly/.
|| All I'm saying is that I don't think it's worth your time worrying about
| it.
|| There's really no positive effect to be had in denying WordPress fans
link
|| karma crumbs.
One of the gains of participating in Free Open Source
project is recognition. No-one is here to deny this. It is,
to an extent, the /raison d'etre/ and source of drive for
projects such as Apache, from an historical perspective at
least. Links to one's site grant recognition whereas
advertisement are intended solely for financial gain. That,
I must admit, I find a tad 'over the line'. I have read the
very reasonable response from the theme's creator and I can
agree with many of the points made. However:
The gain from the links may be better off distributed among
lower levels of the stack, e.g. WordPress developers. I am
not surprised to find that folks like smallmouse (David
House) are rarely around here anymore. If only more people
bother to reward the giants whose shoulders they stand upon.
It's like non-GPL-compliant Linux distributions (notably
Mepis/SimplyMEPIS) that build upon the success of another
(leeching), e.g. CentOS, without necessarily having a
healthy state of reciprocity. And while Red Hat is a mature
and successful company, not all is fine and jolly. Look, for
example, at Canonical (geared up towards a business sector)
and their messed-up relationship with the Debian project.
| Gotta agree with both points. Never have heard a peep about the default
| blogroll links. At the same time, someone develops a theme with a link,
let
| them! It's one thing to be open source, it's another thing to think that
| any of us are stinking rich and can just 'do this for fun' ad infinitum...
The only 'beep' I recall with regards to the blogroll goes
over a year back. It was a mild tiff that involved Mike
Little.
Money made through FOSS is not black money. However, I fear
that by encouraging embedment of link in a stealthy manner,
WordPress may, by offering a precedence case, fall into the
class of software that manipulates the user for self gain.
There are many examples of such projects and you find one
every day in the technology section. This varies from
spyware to lockins.
BTW, just got a rush of hackers emails through, and wanted to update my
statement. :)
I think 'hiding ads in plain view' is bad, without the mentioned caveats
prior to download that Matt and others have mentioned. But a link back to
the author's site would be a different story -- I thought that's where the
conversation was going (i.e., author's shouldn't put links in at all,
shouldn't benefit in the slightest...), and obviously disagree with that
extreme. ;)
I think it's important for Autommatic to police the
community every now and then. WordPress has excellent
reputation which is improves by the day owing to word of
mouth. This can easily be ruined by a bunch of shady
headlines, e.g. Waxy and Scoble's "WordPress Sucks". It's
not always a case of disinformation. Lenience can permit
WordPress to evolve into a malicious monster that it was
never intended to be (e.g. IE5/6), not by design anyway.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz, Ph.D. Candidate in Medical Biophysics
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
http://othellomaster.com - GPL'd 3-D Othello
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
|
