Hello,
first of all, my post's motivation involves my personal opinion and my own judgement, so that it may be biased.
I noticed that in the Sponsor's section of the project's GitHub there are Sponsors in sectors such as gambling and social media like/follower buying. I don't know if this is the kind of business Joplin would like to be associated with.
I (and I understand this is, as mentioned, totally based on a personal judgement) find this very weird. For me, some sponsors look like those websites that try to put ads everywhere and have maybe shady business practices.
I have no authority to judge or decide whether or not a company is suited to be a Joplin sponsor.
I say this without further research on the merit of whether or not some of the Sponsor's business practices are legitimate.
I just got worried that maybe the Sponsor's section was exploited in some way.
It's not being exploited, they support the project and I'm grateful for that. This is in fact relatively common in open source - virtuous companies, if there's such thing, are happy to use the product but not to support it, so it's the gambling companies and similar that end up doing it. Like it or not but you and all Joplin users indirectly benefit from their sponsorship.
Perfect, I get it. As I said, I knew this discussion came from a personal bias. Maybe this was good to change the way I see some things. I'm glad everything is ok.
It's not only about a GitHub page. I wanted to try Joplin for the first time, so I open their landing page (joplinapp.org) and look at this. The most visible sponsor is a gambling website with a link. It also has a dark background. Feels abusive. And if I were the company, I would be ashamed to be near such a logo. Perhaps that is why most sponsors are also sketchy ads.
At least the gambling folks are honest - they are out to fleece the suckers and everybody knows that. You gamble, you will lose. I'd be calling out those ones advertising they will write your term paper for you. Or is cheating fine but gambling is bad? What about gambling that the prof won't catch the cheating?
Yes, the essay writing services are really shady.
I realize that I've never been able to make a donation, but I think I can still say it looks bad to have these products linked to Joplin. With an app like Joplin it's all about user trust. And those kinds of sponsors don't instill trust.
To me it would be different if you didn't give them links to their shady products.
I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell how it makes me feel. What you do with that is up to you.
Remember, you'll never know how many users you lose by having these sponsors. Or how many people get discouraged from donating when they see them.
As a relatively popular open source project, I receive offers like this all the time, probably around 2 or 3 time a month:
- To include permanent promotional links in our blog posts
- To include promotional articles in our News page or social media
- Offers to buy the web clipper or Android app (you know what they'll do with it)
- Offers to add trackers to the web clipper or Android app in exchange for a revenue
- Offers to add ads to our applications
Of course I say no to these offers. But it's still nice to get some revenue since, as you hint, the vast majority of users (that's usually around 98-99%) do not support the open source software they use. So I figured we could accept these sponsors, and put them in a dedicated location clearly labelled "Sponsors" at the bottom of the page. So there's no deception, no sneaky links or article that pretends to be what it's not.
I'm a bit surprised people have a problem with this to be honest. It would never occur to me to tell an open source project that they shouldn't accept sponsorship, when that sponsorship has zero detrimental effect on the software or documentation, and is in fact beneficial since funds are needed to keep the development going.
Well, I'm sure you have some ethical line that you wouldn't want to cross. For some of us, on line gambling and plagiarism services is that line.
I don't think that folks are telling you not to take sponsorship. Just not sponsorships from shady characters. And to be clear, I don't think anyone is accusing you of changing the product based on the sponsorships you are talking. But we are know by the company we keep. I get that you feel things are transparent by calling these things "sponsors". But really they are advertisers. They are paying you for a link to their website. I think of "sponsors" more as people or orgs that are actually committed to your product, but maybe that's just me. I'm not sure if it would hit different if you just labeled the section "Advertisers" and kept it separate from the humans who are supporting the project.
I'm sorry if this feedback isn't welcome or useful.
Some of these companies are actual sponsors and have been for many years like Serei Network and Citric Sheep, Route4Me and others, not to mention the large GitHub sponsors who are listed there too, so Sponsors seem reasonable. Or we could have an Advertisers and a Sponsors section but maybe I don't want to overthink it, as it's at the bottom of the page and I don't think it's doing much harm.
Also I should note that we are not tricking anybody to click on these links. And you use strong words to describe these - it's not plagiarism, it's AI generated essays, which many students do these days in one form or another
None of these websites are illegal and not everybody has a moral problem with them. I could have Google, OpenAI or a big well known company in there and you can be sure lots of people will have a problem with them too, you just can't win. So I think the current situation is a good compromise
Likely the sponsor companies have some Joplin fans and are giving back. Awesome.
