Dries, Let me be among the first to respond to this. I personally do not mind it, if it makes money for the Drupal Foundation non-profit organization (you are registering it soon, right? :-), AND that it is ethically acceptable. By ethically acceptable, I mean that it is completely disclosed to all developers and users of Drupal, and that it is not mandatory (users can disable it if they want). No sneaky business like the .css trick used by Wordpress, or a link farm, ...etc. I am not sure what they exactly mean by "integrate AdSense support into Drupal". Do they just want us to make the Drupal default page for the admin to has a link to signup for Adsense? A standard block for Adsense? As long as it is fully disclosed and can be disabled, I do not see anything wrong with a voluntary referral program, since this is effectively what it is. On the other hand, look at this from another angle: Google sees Drupal as important. I have no idea if they made that offer to other blogging software as well or not, but that makes me feel good to be part of the Drupal community. --- Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:51:51 +0200 From: Dries Buytaert <dries@buytaert.net> Subject: Re: [drupal-devel] some drupal stats To: drupal-devel@drupal.org, boris@bmannconsulting.com Message-ID: <d6c69f7c34744dad259733d3bffb771d@buytaert.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
However, on the making-money-for-the-project angle....Dries, do you want to bring up the Google issue?
I don't have the details at hand here so I'd rather bring it up when I'm back in Belgium. Unfortunately, I guess that is too late now. In short: we got an offer from Google to integrate AdSense support into Drupal. For each Drupal user that signs up with Google and enables Google Ads on his or her Drupal site, we would get money from Google. Clearly, this is a great opportunity to generate some money. However, the question arises: do we want to go there, and if so, how?