[OpenLayers-Dev] links on the wiki

[Cameron Shorter]

Sorry, I'm coming to this thread a bit late.

I agree that it is in appropriate to sprinkle marketing through OL wiki 
pages. It wasn't what I was thinking when creating the link, but I see 
how it can be taken that way. (My intent was to show that there is both 
an individual willing to mentor in the SOC, and also a company backing 
the mentor).

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> 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,
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html