Interessante und spannende Diskussion auf dem Waxy.org Blog um das Thema WordPress und sein verstecktes, aber jetzt aufgedecktes „Einnahmeprogramm“:
The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the
Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost
advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)
Ich lese sehr interessiert die Meinungen der User, die natürlich auseinanderliegen. Insgesamt bin ich selbst hin- und hergerissen, denn es gibt an sich keinen Code of Conduct bei Open Source Projekten iSv wie man Geld verdienen darf und wie nicht:
This poses some interesting questions. First, do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they’re making money off the project? Matt isn’t disclosing anything about this activity to the community. I don’t think anyone would be upset about Matt trying to support WordPress with outside sources of revenue, but as an open-source project, they should be held to a higher level of transparency. Without the users and developers all working for free, it wouldn’t exist.
Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines? Unlike a blog about asbestos news, the WordPress website has nothing to do with asbestos. It capitalizes off the goodwill of the WordPress community, which links to the WordPress website because they support the project — not because they support search engine spam. But as long as there was transparency about their plans, I think this is less of an issue.
via Netzbuch
