A person pays a rather high price for a game and service. I’m not one of those hippy types to debate profit margins or whatnot, but realistically we can agree these games arent cheap. And seeing product placement isnt new – like speed demon racing games with energy drink advirts (Wipeout and redbull) or those modern-era combat games showing a hilariously sarcastic tattered billboard ad for UN peace programs. Dive Belize or Ski-Doo adverts in watersports games.

But actual political advirts? No, no… thats just going too far. Redbull is one thing…it ads flavor to the game. Blowing up a Starbucks in urban warfare almost seems a natural. But paying a lot of money to have political adverts?

The huge difference is that political ads are NEVER straightforward accurate and have only 3 responses… none, agree, disagree. Thats an instant (potential) 30% of people that payed for the game are gonna get pissed at seeing it.

I think this relates to links from WP.org’s theme repository back to sites that provide, primarily or secondarily, themes that are “premium” or “proprietary” or “commercial” … using a GPL community to hook into commercial activity. In effect, gaming an OpenSource project.

Quite coincidentally while snooping RSS parsing (I got /nuthin’/ done this afternoon!) I came across these 2 by Duncan Riley. I don’t like his tone, but he’s not so over the top that his points get blown away:
“More Hypocrisy from Mullenweg and WordPress with new themes jihad”
“How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source” (good comments by Matt here)

I think I put it quite well in chat, but neither Jeffro or Matt got what I meant: I think it matters if I follow a link from the repository to a free theme and don’t have a pitch pushed in my face. If that’s so, then I don’t care if there are “proprietary” themes on the site. At least I didn’t get fished in.

cheers
–bentrem

AT Mike- Love LOVE your comment, made me laugh out loud. Thanks!