[consulting] Drupal.org advertising proposals requested

[Earnest Berry]

Laura Scott wrote:
>
> A rough analogy: We live in Boulder, on the edge of mountains. 
> Everybody loves looking at the mountains. Think of all those eyeballs. 
> Should Boulder sell billboard space on the mountainsides to cash in on 
> all that attention? It sure would bring in a lot of cash. But does 
> that make Boulder a better place, in the end? It's a rough analogy, to 
> be sure, and related more directly with aesthetic beauty than we're 
> talking here at d.o, but I hope it illustrates in a way how commercial 
> exploitation of the Drupal commons runs the risk of diminishing the 
> value of the commons.
I don't think d.o. is looking to cash out or sell its soul. But running 
a busy site and maintaining Sun Servers isn't cheap. I do agree with you 
though about keeping d.o. clean...pehraps the d.c. (drupal.com) method 
is the best way to achieve this. Similar to what sugar has done in 
splitting it's "product" (obviously drupal runs its organization 
different than sugar though)
> I hope that any advertising program would somehow reinforce the Drupal 
> community. Perhaps make the advertising opportunity only available to 
> people and companies that have made tangible (code & documentation) 
> contributions to Drupal directly. That might even have the effect of 
> incentivizing larger companies like Yahoo and IBM, who have been 
> working various R&D projects on Drupal but have not given back, afaik, 
> to contribute their code improvements (assuming they are improvements) 
> in order to have the chance to advertise with a modest presence.
I know many large organizations that have given thousand, some even 
100K+ and more to Drupal. It doesn't come as a posting to the front 
page, its comes as a simple patch from user "X", or a new module from 
user "Y". I think they are giving back, however, I don't think Drupal is 
at the place yet where IBM nor Yahoo! will be endorsing it on their main 
page. But I mean, a 8 month project on IBM Dev-works isn't anything to 
sneeze at either. IBM also did give us the base start to DB2. 
Calculating the hourly man hours from IBM (200-250 on avg/hr), say 60 
hours of work went into that (project as a whole).....do the math :).
I think this is the best method as the burden falls on the community for 
maintain and push forward the "product", and not some core group.