Commercialisation / Advertisement in Drupal.org modules

Just as a point of reference, I want it to be clear that free software has long been conceived of as not noncommercial.

“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims. ... Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need. ... Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success.

cf. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling

Large projects that are funded primarily through commercial support and development can and should exist in the Drupal ecosystem, though I agree that culturally it could be abrasive for projects to go "full WordPress." I think we should make room for more experimentation in this regard, though we can obviously give proactive guidance to the sorts of things that would be well received in our community.

Thanks @rszrama, good points and well explained. I feel that we need some guidelines from the community leaders, for example

• Is it OK for a Contrib module on Drupal.Org to "call home" to the developers website?
• What information is it reasonable to transmit? How should this be communicated to site owners? How should we manage Data Protection implications?
• What control should the site owner have? Is it OK to default to enabled when the module is installed? What about enabling automatically as part of an upgrade?

The Commerce situation felt uncomfortable to me because it was a surprise automatic opt in on upgrade and the opt out was hidden.

I believe the governance team should also comment on the concerns regarding the newly added advertisement in commerce_shipping raised on 📌 Use the setting to allow disabling partner banners Fixed .

I wanted to open another ticket on this, but this one is a pretty close one, so I am adjusting it to cover it.

Also related, 📌 Unconfigurable "Hire the maintainers" banner is against Policy on advertising in projects Needs review

#3 →

I have a strong opinion on:

Is it OK for a Contrib module on Drupal.Org to "call home" to the developers website?

And my strict answer here is: No!

For sooo many reasons... But first of all because a development enviroment is rather a "private room". You can not expect this project to be a publicly available website in all cases. What about private networks with sensitive data? Additionally you may break law without knowledge in the EU GDLR commitment by doing this. Sure it depends if a module asks for that before and has an option there to disable BEFORE, which would make it slidely more acceptable, for me. OK. But generally spoken, first of all: No. No. No.

because it was a surprise automatic opt in on upgrade and the opt out was hidden.

This is absolutely inacceptable for me, ESPECIALLY in a commerce enviroment with client data in the system. An absolute no-go.

Apart from that I would like to quote myself from Slack with a very important reminder for this discussion here:

Please let us beware that all these contributions have been a lot of hard work of many people over many years and we should not build our opinion or arguments only on the basis of indignation against things we don't like. All discussion should be constructive intented to leave positive motivations for all who contribute to Drupal.

@dqd - I appreciate that quotation! That's a very important message in order for us all to be sure we are working towards a solution that helps Drupal be more sustainable for the people who contribute so much, while at the same time avoiding certain minefields.

I have to agree with @rszrama that allowing maintainers to include certain kinds of commercial interest is not only reasonable, but perhaps important for the long term health and support of their modules.

That said - I totally agree that we should have certain standards. I don't think anyone wants to take people by surprise, risk compromising PII, or create a negative user experience. But there is room to improve the options for promoting fiscal support without having to do any of those things.

I think @rszrama and team are being thoughtful in hearing the feedback, and I trust that they'll work out an improved solution - and we can use this experience to understand and update our general governance for this.

I added some suggestions. Feedback welcome please, especially @rszrama how do they sound to you??