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Sandboxed file accessSandboxed file accessPosted Sep 6, 2012 9:52 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996)In reply to: Sandboxed file access by khim Parent article: Ubuntu's new app developer upload process proposal
"yes, they are free-as-in-beer, but that's because they include ads and these don't really fly in open-source world."
Any specific reason? Do ads services require some secret key on the application side that could not be committed to a source repository?
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Sandboxed file access Posted Sep 6, 2012 9:59 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
There's also the issue that many people in our community find ads somewhat offensive, so would release a build of the program without them, which may well be more popular.
Sandboxed file access Posted Sep 6, 2012 10:36 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
Well, that would mean somebody else is volunteering to do your packaging :)
Or one could just allow to switch it off. Users who'd like to support you would keep it on, user who don't or prefer direct donations could just treat it like adblock for browsers.
Anyway, the question was if there are technical reasons prohibiting ads supported Free Software
Sandboxed file access Posted Sep 6, 2012 10:42 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Certainly many of us find ads offensive *when badly done*. But I'm about as strongly against ads as you can find -- I block them almost everywhere because I have visual problems which mean that any ads displayed next to text will visually overlap the text, so if they're not of very similar colour and 'ink' density (which they never are) they'll make the text unreadable. And ads that leap out at you are unacceptable because they're a distraction and I have enough problems with *that* as it is.
But even for me *some* ads are tolerable. Google's text ads are of the same density as the text and are clearly delineated so I can skip them. Ads on the special-offer Kindle are acceptable because they're only displayed when the device is off and thus not displaying text I want to read anyway. And because the latter ads, at least, are actually targetted to some degree, sometimes those ads *are* useful, in that they tell me about things I would have wanted if I'd known they existed. If you'd told me three years ago that I'd avoid paying to turn off ads because the ads were useful I wouldn't have believed you. But no, it *is* possible to do advertising right enough that even someone with biological reasons to loathe advertising can like them. It's just that most online-ad people are so far from that that it is hard to believe.
Sandboxed file access Posted Sep 6, 2012 11:37 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> But I'm about as strongly against ads as you can find
> <snip> > But even for me *some* ads are tolerable.
You're not as strongly against ads as me, then ;)
I'd argue adverts are never ever truly useful as recommendation agents. They are inherantly driven by who has the money to run them. So they work against small, new, innovative players. Let's not forget, our contemporary problem is *not* that we have too little information about new, interesting things. Advertising serves to shift the balance of the things we hear most about to those of entrenched interests.
Then there's the whole not wanting to be manipulated by said interests any more than you can avoid (and people tend to underestimate the degree to which marketing works, even on them.) Or surveilled by them.
Any business model that relies on ads is one I disapprove of. It pushes the initial economic cost to the reader down to zero, but at too great a cost.
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