Folks, I would like to apologize about the ad/spam many of you have received today, and that I discovered this afternoon while being at a customer site (the customer received the spam and is also on cocoon-{users,dev}).
Not a problem, Sylvain! No hard feelings on this side. I'm sorry if I came off as a little grouchy in my earlier message, I had just woken up, and it wasn't a good way to start the day.
<snip what="explanation"/>
I sincerely and deeply apologize for what happened. Monday morning, I'll had a strong explanation with this guy, so that he learns once for all some of the rules of the opensource world. Some of these rules also are no different from that of the "real" world: gaining trust and confidence from other people is a long and difficult task, and loosing it can happen very fast. I don't want to loose the trust and confidence of the Cocoon community, which has been so important to me for many years. Today is the 3rd birthday of me becoming a Cocoon committer. Sad birthday.
Smack him upside the head with a copy of the Cluetrain :) Happy birthday, BTW...
Nevertheless, a lot of people are doing their lives with Cocoon, and it's very difficult to get in touch with Cocoon users. How could we do this in a community-friendly way? Sending announcements to -users doesn't seem more appropriate to me than spamming grabbed email addresses. I'm very interested in hearing your opinions and starting a discussion about the relations of the Cocoon community and the people that provide some commercial services around it.
Here's what I would do: Send a message to -dev and -users explaining that you're going to be starting to send out (commercial) announcements regarding what you do, and if anyone is interested, to either sign up on a site or send a message to a special email address.
That way, you don't spam the list with the announcements, and people can totally opt-in. I think that's the key.
I had also mentioned this off-list: I think it might also be wise for you guys to publish some RSS feeds (in multiple languages if possible) that have these announcements. IMO that would be the most community-friendly way. I'm in the process of starting my own consulting company, and I'm already helping one client who sees the light of RSS and how annoying commercial email can get. I'm thrilled to see the direction that it can take.
Sylvain
PS: I was first thinking of sending this email from my work email address, but finally chose to use my apache address since these apologies come from a member of the Cocoon community that felt offended by this.
Regards,
Tony
