Turning off Paid Adverts for Sponsored Media

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 5/3/06, Stephen Krenzel <sgk284 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just a quick thought, feel free to knock it down if you so desire. What
> about a "pass along" kind of setup. Where receivers of free media can opt in
> to pass the media along when they are done installing it.

The value of a working rescue environment on media that you can lay
your hands on imeediately in times of severe system problems is
invaluable. I would never ever recommend someone purposely giving away
the only  copy of the media in their possession which has the rescue
environment.  And while this sort of "sloppy seconds" distribution of
a single piece of installation media may make sense in a closely
associated community of people who know each other,

Additionally I would definitely fear for the quality of passed-along
media after a small finite number of pass-alongs. Anyone who uses
netflix service knows exactly what I'm talking about.  And I think you
grossly underestimate how difficult it will be to deal with the
quality issues... let alone deal with tracking how much of the media
which falls off the map competely and isn't passed on. Without a
central organization through which media returns and then gets sent
back out from.. there is zero quality control or tracking of the media
in circulation. I do not think its in fedora's best interest to
encourage the re-distribution of media over and over again that does
not make a serious effort at media defect tracking.

Even if you can have a centralized system for tracking.. you still
leave users in the lurk by encouraging them to give up the rescue
environment available on the installation media. I care far more about
making sure people have equitable access to recovery tools than i do
about the sheer number of people who have fedora installed. The people
who need free media are also going to be the people who are going to
be in a huge panic if they have a system problem later and need the
rescue environment to sort it out.

-jef