Vanilla Forums Now Come With Sponsor Links

I guess what bothers me the most about this isn’t the actual links being in the forum code. It’s more of the excuse Lussumo gives for placing the ads in the open source code.

As of yesterday (August 19, 2007), I’ve placed three plain-text links into the side panel of Vanilla directly below the “About Vanilla” information box. These little links will end up paying for the lion’s share of costs associated with giving Vanilla away for free. I ask that anyone who downloads Vanilla please leave them in there. As you will see, they are very unobtrusive: written in the same light colored way that the “About Vanilla” box appears.

Now, I (obviously) have no problem with people making money. I’m an American and proud capitalist. But, if you’re going to raise money, be honest about it. Vanilla is an open-source platform. If hosting fees are the issue, people would donate space. Matt Mullenweg has personally offered to provide the resources to distribute Vanilla if Lussumo removes the links. As far as I know, his offer has not been accepted.

My first thought when reading Matt’s post, was that Mark from Lussumo doesn’t mention hosting fees, so the costs could be something else. However, Matt points out to another commenter that Mark had mentioned it in a previous posting:

On the flipside, my hosting costs are quite huge at the moment, and I’ve had a few other advertising agencies contact me about some linking strategies which aren’t as in-your-face as the google adsense, and will also be much more lucrative. Hopefully some of that will pan out in the near future and I can offset some of the costs of running this community and giving away this software for free.

Matt makes a good point:

The person paying for these links is not doing it to support open source software or the goodness of their heart, they’re doing it to get their links on lots of different websites to trick Google and other search engines into ranking those websites higher. It’s naïve to think it’s anything else. By the way, here are the links that have been added:

<a href="http :// www. myhomeloanadvice.com">Home Loan</a>
<a href="http :// www. unitedmortgagerates.com">Mortgage Rates</a>
<a href="http :// www. casinowatchdogs.com">Online Casino</a>

And neither are the advertising companies bartering between Mark and these advertisers.

I don’t use Vanilla, so I don’t really have anything to lose here. But I think the main objection is how Mark’s going about it.  Not the fact that he is. Several users have told Mark that they’d be willing to pay a couple hundred for a commercial version, so the links don’t need to be used. Perhaps he’ll consider that, but he hasn’t yet. Others are willing to donate money or, like Matt, the resources.

What do you think?