[OpenLayers-Dev] links on the wiki

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 05:27:39PM -0700, Tim Schaub wrote:
> Hey-
> 
> Something about links to marketing pages on the OL wiki bugs me.
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/SummerOfCode?action=diff&version=28
> 
> If you've got a nice demo using OpenLayers, I think the Gallery page is 
> an appropriate place.  If you've got a project using OpenLayers, I think 
> it's great that our wiki references it.  However, until we decide that 
> we're going to have a page for people selling services around 
> OpenLayers, I don't feel that great about links getting dropped around 
> the wiki.
> 
> Anybody else have any thoughts?

Totally agree. I'm generally in favor of people making money off of
OpenLayers: That's fine. But figuring out how to do that is not an
OpenLayers problem, it's an external problem.

I also have no problem with users mentioning their affiliation in
wikipages where appropriate. Before reading this email, I edited the
page to do exactly that, because I think that's a perfectly acceptable
piece of information to share, if people think it's important to their
mentoring in SoC. 

I encourage all organizations who support OpenLayers software to
register for the OSGeo Service Provider directory. I see that LISAsoft,
for example, is listed there already, as is TOPP, DM Solutions, etc. Any
time a user asks where they can find out about commercial support for
OpenLayers, I have no problem with them being directed to 
http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1&MUL_TECH%5B%5D=00038 , the
OSGeo SPD. 

However, in general, commercial support for OpenLayers/corporate
marketing materials are beyond the scope of the mailing list and the
wiki.

In order to ensure that we have an agreed upon standard for this, I'd
like to suggest that we adopt a mailing list policy that recommends that
offers of commercial support only be offered off the mailing list. (What
you do off the mailing list is up to you.) The reason for not wanting
such things on the mailing list is pretty clear: it's a matter of scale.
There are more than 40 organizations listed in the OSGeo SPD as offering
support: if all of them replied to every user who had a problem offering
commercial support, it would by far drown out the mailing list traffic
and decrease the utility of the list.

Note that this doesn't apply, in my mind, to things like signatures,
which often have some implicit advertistement.

If there is a desire to maintain some set of providers beyond the OSGeo
infrastructure, either in the OL Wiki, or somewhere else, we should
discuss that, but in general, I think that just mentioning a company
name is plenty of information for wiki or mailing list purposes.   

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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