Sketchy Marketing

Almost all projects need to do some kind of marketing for anyone to discover the project, otherwise it can easily get lost into a dark corner of the internet. Some projects however will be aggressive in their marketing approach, abusing communities or performing questionable actions to resolve their hunger for growth.

This doesn’t really directly factor into whether a project itself is FOSS or not, but it’s often an indicator that the project cares more about FOSS for marketing compared to the rights actually afforded.

What’s considered “sketchy” is subjective, but the following are common indicators of such marketing:

• Repeated promotion within a community with little other non-promotional interaction.
• Abuse of community features, like faking responses or engagement.
• Very frequent blog posts about topics tangentially related to their project, providing more SEO assistance than insight.
• Cold (spam) emailing, especially where you have not given marketing consent.
• Repeated responding to years-old community comments with project links.
• Gated content behind forms which require personal information without very clear purpose.