LinuxQuestions.org and Affero

Recently I was approached by a company that wants to help LinuxQuestions.org. They are currently helping many great projects such as KDE, the ASF and the PHP group. I am considering participating in the program, but I would like everyones opinion before I procede. Here is what affero had to say:

LinuxQuestions, like many Free Software and Open Source projects has grown out of a passion to help others. Occasionally, projects need donations to get certain things done. LinuxQuestions is considering making it easy for its members to donate to various causes as a way to say thanks to others who have answered their questions here. Here's how it will work: Affero is a new service which enables donations to projects like LinuxQuestions, Apache, & PHP. They primarily offer URLs to include in .sigs for individuals who care about getting funding to a particular cause. They also offer .sigs for communities on mailing lists and forums. You can check them out at http://www.affero.org.

I think finegan summed it up best when he said:

Its a nifty idea. Basically it seems that they want to make a few nickels off of getting frustrated users to give money to their helper geek's favorite cause. Affero makes penny fractions on the dollar that makes up for their overhead, the cause gets free cash, and the geek gets /.-esque karma points that will appeal to a lot of people's sense of competition. I like it.

So what do you think? Would you like to see LinuxQuestions participate in the Affero program? What would you think of integrating it into the forums? Any and all feedback is welcome. Thanks.

--jeremy

I have setup the following polls to help decide what projects you would like to see supported. Please vote in all of the polls!

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=25731
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=25732
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=25733
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=25734

If you see a project on the Affero list that I have left out and you think deserves our support please let me know. Also if you know of a project that is not on the Affero list but should be also post that! Thanks again for your feedback.

--jeremy

Jeremy,

In my opinion this seems to be a great idea. I think that any reasonable above board way to support a project such as this is always worth considering. This forum has certainly been of great help to me in the past and I feel it is vital that any opportunity which makes the running and maintence of this forum a little bit easier is seized. Speaking for myself I feel the continued existance of this forum is vital to my learning curve with Linux and anything which can help the long term existance of the forum has to be a good thing.

Obviously certain standards have to be met, for example I would not like to see a plethora of 'porn links' supporting the board and I am 100% sure that you agree with me on this one!

Keep up the great work as there are still a lot of questions to be answered

Iain

Here's the logic of what really turned me on to the idea:

The current contributing members schema is great, simple, and only took me about 40 keystrokes to drop my cash on LQ, but the big thing to think about when running a donations system is: why was I donating?

LQ is my hobby, just like dozens, maybe hundreds, of other guys here; and I want to be able to keep at my hobby. So that accounts for a few hundred of the 13k members that stop in from time to time. But the contributing member aspect doesn't always appeal to that sysadmin at XCompany with some weird problem that Trickykid solves for him in a 4 post thread. The sysadmin really doesn't want to join the community, he just needs his problem fixed before the mailserver goes kazoo because his Sendmail skillz had him running an open relay and his clueless IT manager threatens his department with a ton of Redmond "corporate support".

Affero's system might solve this problem for LQ, getting donations from people who are genuinely appreciative, but where the apparatus for donation isn't so direct. I guess its really going to depend on how much coverage Affero is going to be able to get in the Open Source geek helper community.

They're going to be showcasing this system at LinuxWorld right? When and where is that? Probably California... I need a vacation... hmmm....

Cheers,

Finegan

I agree the banners with porn etc are not needed, the popup ads that fill the screen like MSN produces or other large carriers is greatly despised.

Finding information is the key here, less we forget the net was built to share information not SPAM, or ads.

However in today’s society it is ever-growing pushes to get web content out there, for some reason the important people at where ever still believe that everyone American has a computer and is glued to it.

These days it seems to be mostly Geeks like me, kids after 2pm and the "Closet act" after 9 pm.

Jeremy I say use your best discretion. I am staying neutral on this decision because I lack the time to investigate the issue.

Thanks
Hal

I went to their site and it is still not very clear what this means. Are they proposing to put adlinks within posted messages?

I am very what I gain from LQ now. I went to their site and cant seem to really undetstand what they are offering. I think we should wait and see how thinge go before we make any decision. At the moment I am staying neutral.

I read the Affero site and am honestly quite confused. I hope someone can take the time to give a somwhat detailed explanation to this one. To be honest. I am not familiar with the /. system though I frequently visit the site, and I haven't really researched the Affero system.

What I understand is, that this is a good oppportunity for Linux Questions to become, well, highly sustainable. And that's great for everybody. This site has reached critical mass (which Affero knows, of course) so the difficulties of sustaining it have increased... so why not.

I just hope things get explained in detail because average joes and newbies like me who start by trying Linux out may get scared (out of the forum and out of Linux) if they think this is just some money making scheme.

This is not new stuff, actually. There was a service like that with e-mails. They provided the SMTP server for you, in exchange for a small ads placed at the end of your message. In return, your ad was placed when others sent e-mails... It was kind of like a banner exchange network (LinkExchange, BannerSwap), and it was appropriately named mailswap. I really liked that service, but it got shutdown for some reason...

Anyway, I think this should work.

Some of the questions about Affero's service could probably be answered at the http://www.affero.net site. It has demos of most of the functions that are possible with the service.

Also, there is a short explanation of the service on the company home page, which is at http://www.affero.com.

The affero.org site, which was referenced before, goes into some details on the system, why it was developed, and how to participate in the "project", but it doesn't really go into details that a newbie would understand.

If you click on my URL .sig here (http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=creed&p=schools) or below, you could see first hand how I use the service. We've made many changes already, based upon user feedback, and are quite interested in everyones comments on making the service more easy to use. Let me know if you have any specific suggestions, and I'll make sure we address it.

-creed

Give it a 3 month trial period in which everybody can judge for themselves. If it's good...great; if not yank the darned thing.

Well, IMO, it comes down to the impact such a move will have. Is it a matter of ads, pop-ups, etc? Or is it a matter of "backend" changes?

As a rule, I am very leary of the introduction of commercial interests into the *development* or *open support* nature of the entire Linux Project (which is the thousands of autonomous groups and persons involved in all sorts of different parts of a 'working' platform, above and beyond the "real" Linux Project, that is just the kernel development).

Anyway, all that hot air was meant to say I'm usually against it, until proven how little it will (or won't) impact the nature of the group as it stands now.

Brian Brooking
Senoir Systems Engineer
BNB Associates
brooking@bnbassociates.net

This change will not have anything to do with ads/adlinks and will be 100% optional. Right now the exact detail have not been ironed out. We are just looking for opinions and suggestions. It may be as simple as something like: if you have an affero account an icon will appear on the bottom of you posts (by the pm/email/buddy icons) that will allow people to donate on your behalf. It may be something else. I encourage everyone who reads this thread to post in it - like I said your opinions are what we are looking for.

--jeremy

Alright, I get the voluntary donation part...now on the rating part...what if the person that you are trying to help is not that "nice", and for no good reason they give you bad rating??, what is that going to do to your reputation when you want to help other people?, are they going to trust you less with your suggestion because some jerk gave you bad rating in the past? Sure, like finegan said, this may prompt for great competition, but if anyone can affect your rating reputation then I'm not too sure I would like something like that... I'm not saying that people on purpose are going to try and mess your rating...but then I think that this rating will actually take away from the pure will of wanting to help others without any rating, or monetary compensation, it will sort of replace the joy you get of actually having helped someone with their questions and just getting a big "thanks." Instead people would be looking for a "good rating" and perhaps some moneraty return.
What do you guys think?

I've just joined LinuxQuestions, but I've known Chris and Affero for a while now. Many of the principals at Affero were part of Mandrake a while back, and all are committed to Open Source/Free software. They're organized commerically for legal and financial reasons (I think), but they're not charging large fees for their service. The 10% of donations that they use to cover their costs is quite low as compared to other fund-rasing organizations. That's why I agreed to have Schoolforge signed up as a recipient. (And of course, I encourage you to vote for Schoolforge on the appropriate poll. :-) ) You can see the type of message an individual can put in his .sig by clicking on the link in mine.