After thinking more about the distinction I made in Should organizations relating to the defense sector being able to sponsor NixOS? - #158 by piegames, I noticed the following thing: the actual issue here is with advertisements and publicity for certain companies. And while I think that sponsoring inherently implies some form of publicity, this distinction does matter because somebody already proposed having special sponsorship tiers for such cases (which I’d personally disagree with doing, but that’s besides the point).
Another important reason to discuss this, is that we need to talk about how to deal with companies like Anduril being present at an event like NixCon, even when they are not a sponsor. At NixCon 2023, we had an Anduril employee attending at the conference and holding a talk as a community member, and I think that banning them would have been the wrong thing to do.
The issue is, that many people are attending the conference both as individual community members as well as employees of their company, and that companies usually put some form of ads or “we’re hiring” on the slides of the talks of their employees.
My proposal for a policy about employees whose companies we do not want to advertise for (regardless of what the rules for that will turn out to be):
- They are welcome to attend any events as community members.
- No company logo on badges (in case that is a thing at the event), no giveaway swag or flyers etc., no recruitment.
- They are welcome to hold talks as community members.
- The topic of the talk must not be inherently related to the company. Given that, talking about company related projects or work done on company time is acceptable.
- No company logo on slides(?)
- Mentioning the employer as part of the introduction is okay(?)
- It is okay to use a company mail address if it is the most fitting one to use within the scope of the talk
- It is okay to link to projects within company namespaces, if they are relevant to the talk
- Customized rules and exceptions may be negotiated with the even organizers should this be necessary.