On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 19:34, Vincent Danen wrote: > I think your concerns are unfounded, and I also think you're being a little > silly. Do you close your eyes when you're driving around and see billboards > that advertise stuff? Do you close your eyes and mute the TV when the
I don't drive. > commercials are on? Do you leave the theatre because you paid to see a > movie and not a car commercial before the feature starts? I live in England. We have two state-funded channels with no advertising. I watch these far more than the other channels, precisely *because* they have no advertising. I try and arrive at the movies between the adverts and the start of the main feature. > I think you're a little out of line here, personally. It's not that > intrusive, there will be no "plastering" of ads, and once you modify the > bookmarks, they're gone. How many times do you plan to install and actually What about the screensavers? And besides, as I said, the point isn't whether they're easy to get rid of. I'm bothered about three things, as I've already stated. One: the immediate impact a distro with advertising in will have on users, compared to distros that have none. This is one fairly major reason the "TV / movies / sports / whatever" comparison just doesn't hold up. People are *used* to adverts on their televisions, on their movies, at their sports events. They're NOT used to adverts on their operating systems. Mandrake is setting a precedent, which it often does, but this time it's a rather dangerous position to be in. It's going to take all the flak and all the abuse. Two: the fact that this *minor* level of advertising sets a precedent within Mandrakesoft, i.e., we can use advertising within the OS to generate revenue. What happens when the revenue from this stream falls off, as it inevitably will? Well, the precedent's been established. Why not just have more and more and more intrusive advertising? This is the scenario which has given Internet Explorer users multiple pop-up adverts with sound effects that are impossible to close, from the tame beginnings of small banner adverts. Three: the way in which it was "announced". No, a five minute hack job of a page thrown together after this had broken on OSNews and Slashdot DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN to cut it. If Mandrakesoft wanted to get their side of the story out first without this turning into a public relations atrocity, they really really *needed* to broadcast it themselves to the major Linux news outlets. Not leave the details on an obscure page of the corporate website, intended for advertisers not users, until some sharp-eyed newshound picked it up. Phew. Diatribe ends. As a sidenote, I hope the mdksoft guys realise that I personally, in public (as opposed to on this list, which is generally only read by Cooker diehards, I think), am going out to bat for them and not airing the concerns I posted to this list. Read my posts to the OSNews thread that followed the announcement of this news, all of which are supportive of MDK. > watch the entire install (does anyone do that anymore?) I think *you're* a little incongruous here. Clearly you're either lying to me or lying to the people to whom you hope to sell advertising. If you don't really believe the above, you're lying to me. If you really believe no-one watches the installation process, how the heck do you expect someone to pay several thousand dollars to advertise there? > Besides, it's ok to advertise links to OSS and GNU stuff but it's not ok to > advertise Linux-related commercial stuff to make a couple bucks so we can > have another version of Mandrake in the future? > > I hate to say it, but it cracks me up how people are so against advertising, > our business model, and things we do to make revenue so that the developers > and others in the company can eat and afford to spend all of their time > working on the distro. Sounds like the community would rather have a nice > distribution but all the developers should be homeless and starving. No-one buys Debian, it has no adverts, and last time I checked none of the developers were starving. Sure, this is an unfair comparison. However, it illustrates the exaggeration of the complaint. > (And no, I won't bother contributing to this thread anymore) Good for you. -- adamw
