IBM will soon be sponsoring Unix & Linux!

Question

We're excited to announce that IBM will be sponsoring Unix & Linux for the next quarter (maybe more) beginning tomorrow! These types of partnerships that help us bring more resources to our communities would not be possible without your hard work and dedication and we're extremely thankful for and proud of everything that you've done and continue to do.

You've got questions about what this means, we're sure - and we're here to answer 'em! We've anticipated a few which we'll explore below:

How will the sponsorship be displayed?

Good question! The sponsorship will be shown in top right of the header of the site in a manner that's similar to the mockup below:

What else changes?

That's easy: absolutely nothing.

Quoting from the MSE post linked in the introduction:

First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.

Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who would be interested in their products know about them.

I think I found a design glitch / bug.

Please report it as a separate bug. Thank you!

I have another question or concern.

Leave an answer below (I know it might seem odd to leave a question as an answer) and we'll do our best to answer you.

Thank you again, everyone! Again, this would not have been possible without the huge amount of work you've all put into making Unix & Linux so successful.

Answer 1

Putting aside my opinion of IBM and the state of support for U&L, I think that such static banners are much better than the usual ads, especially those that rely on sharing personal data with Google/DoubleClick or other similar AdTech.

I hope StackExchange got a good deal out of IBM both for itself and for the community. If this goes on for a while, it might be worth checking whether people start thinking this is a support site for AIX.

More in detail: the banner loads just fine without Google's JavaScript or other resources, because it's a simple SVG hosted locally. However it also tries to load a tracking pixel and the link goes to DoubleClick, which is silly. Just handle the click counting directly with IBM if you need to. (Are clicks really the point?)

<a class="grid--cell" href="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackclk/N1114924.1948300STACKOVERFLOW/B25058705.294197466;dc_trk_aid=487473321;dc_trk_cid=142595284;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;gdpr=${GDPR};gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_755}">
                            <img src="https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/unix/Img/LogoSponsored.svg?v=91aca5556ef3" alt="Sponsored logo">
                                <img src="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackimp/N1114924.1948300STACKOVERFLOW/B25058705.294197466;dc_trk_aid=487473321;dc_trk_cid=142595284;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;gdpr=${GDPR};gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_755}?" border="0" height="1" width="1" style="display: none !important;" hidden="">
                        </a>

Answer 2

Why is it an ad? I hadn't even realized this had started since my adblocker hides the logo:

It is probably safe to assume that many (most?) visitors to a site like this will be techies and will likely have an addblocker, so it seems strange to run the risk of using an ad instead of a static image. Is it so that IBM can see that they're actually getting clicks from here which would presumably justify the commercial arrangement between IBM and SE? Is having a tracker embedded on all of our pages really the best way for that?

Answer 3

Will the sponsorship mean that some resources might be dedicated to fixing bugs that particularly impact this site?

Answer 4

If only that would mean more Red Hat (remember, IBM bought Red Hat) and mostly Gnome, Freedesktop.org, etc (or anything that is controlled close or far by them) guys would come here and help people sorting out their own software bugs since a lot of the very begged bug reports are mostly "wont-fixed" because "it's no fun to my ego doing this"...