[wp-hackers] Text ads in themes

[Roy Schestowitz]

___/ 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
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