[hackerspaces] Proprietary Product Company as a sponsor of FOSS event

[charlie wallace]

It is a hard place to be in, on one hand you're against
commercial/proprietary, on the other hand you want their money.

Take their money and everything that comes with it, come to the dark
side we have cookies.



On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:52 AM, Avinash Sonawane <rootkea at gmail.com> wrote:
> We are a bunch of hackers at Hacker's Den (http://hackersden.org) who
> believe in sharing and openness. We give these values an utmost
> importance and do not use/support any proprietary product at all. We
> are going to organise a FOSS event in coming few days. But at the
> moment we are kinda puzzled over sponsorship for the event.
>
> 1) To have a proprietary product company as a sponsor of FOSS event is
> it morally right? I mean there will be banners, flyers of that
> proprietary company all over the venue. In an event we are promoting
> FOSS and on a venue we are promoting/marketing proprietary product
> company. Isn't it contradictory behaviour?
>
> But if we deny the sponsorship aren't we depriving that proprietary
> company of doing a noble deed (of supporting a FOSS event)?
>
> 2) What about proprietary *service* company?  I mean the one which
> serves it's client with say system administration or building a dbms
> system (which is closed source suppose) for the client e.g. Infosys
> (http://www.infosys.com/), Wipro (www.wipro.com), Persistent
> (www.persistent.com) etc. Is it something different with the
> proprietary service company compared to proprietary product company?
>
> Should we accept the sponsorship or deny it?
>
> 3) A solution?
> Accepting a sponsorship from a proprietary company (product/service)
> and placing a large banner at the entrance of a venue as well as on
> the website saying "We do not necessarily support any of our sponsors'
> products or philosophy." as a countermeasure, will work?
> Or is it similar to printing "smoking is injurious to health" on
> cigarette packets and continuing the cigarette production at the same
> time and later on denying any responsibility saying "We warned you"?
> Personally I think printing a warning on cigarette packet is a big
> joke; because if you really cared for the health of society you would
> have stopped the production itself.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Avinash Sonawane (RootKea)
> PICT, Pune
> http://www.rootkea.wordpress.com
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