Sponsorship notation in posts on *ros.org

I’ve seen sometimes when people working under temporary contract open pull requests declaring the sponsorship in the PR description. IMO it’s fine, and actually nice and modest way to show the opensource contribution of private business entities.

What about posts on *ros.org, e.g. here discourse and answers?

I’ve seen a few times that someone put links to the products of (supposedly) her/his own on their answers posts, then got removed by moderators. I agree that obvious sales ad like that are not suitable on opensource forums. But what about sponsorship that enable the content of the posts?

My temporary part-time employer requests me to add the sponsorship on my posts that are related to their service but I’m just unsure, and afraid that micro-level notation like that could rather give more negative impressions.

I’ve seen it as well - mostly on ROS Answers and github. I don’t really mind, if it’s not too in your face.

But it should also not be the other way around (almost ‘covert’), which is something I’ve seen more recently: posting links to tutorials/blog posts/repositories that on the outside look independent, but turn out to be directly tied to commercial interests, without the poster mentioning this. Some recent ROS Answers posters have done this.

Obviously I’m not against anyone making any money, but I do believe that if you do something like that (ie: use something akin to product placement to expose unsuspecting readers to your product) it would be nice to add something like: I’m posting this here which will probably help you, but just so you know, I’m affiliated / working there / the owner of the service.

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As a guiding principal I would use the etiquette section of our Support guidelines which states that all content should be focused on the topic at hand. If a product etc actually is a valid solution to the problem that’s fine. However if it’s only tangentially related or unrelated that’s not.

Acknowledging support for a contribution in a PR is fine. And if you’re making a significant contribution on the forums in an announcement or something, acknowledging support for your work is also fine. But it should not be a large portion of the content.

And definitely to @gavanderhoorn’s mention any promotions references with commercial interest should be clearly visible as such and not be veiled.

For this specifically I’d suggest integrating it into the introduction/description. As an example for an announcement.
“I"m happy to announce the results of project foo. I’ve been working on it the last few months with the support of Company XYZ. In this project we achieved bar and baz. … Picture… blurb… links to repo… etc”

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