Linux Needs An Advertising Platform

GNU/Linux needs an advertising platform. What I mean is that GNU/Linux projects around the web need incentives to keep them going. If they could hook in advertising in an inobtrusive way, such as Google AdSense, or what Mozilla did by putting the Google search option in their browser, we could bring needed cash to GNU/Linux communities so that people could actually quit their day jobs and devote full-time to projects, improving things. Unfortunately, a few of us in the Free, Libre, Open Source Software movement have differed with Google and Yahoo because of their approach to censorship in China, or in turning over statistics to the Chinese government so that they could imprison people. What needs to happen, instead, is a FLOSS movement that builds a new advertising platform, perhaps hooked up with a new search engine system that could rival Google and Yahoo. I've seen Mozdev, but it's slow and put on top of JSP (bleck!). (JSP is still proprietary stuff, right? And Java/JSP is often slower than LAMP/LAPP projects, right?)

Moreover, the ads that are used in forums and websites, along with the intelli-add popups you get when you put your cursor over double-underlined words, need to be wiped clean of anything proprietary. It needs to be FLOSS or it just doesn't get added.

Last, such an advertising platform needs to work much like Google AdSense, but not be penetrable as far as privacy. The search engine, if that becomes an integral part of this project, needs to also not remember stats on people so that those stats could then be turned over to governments. We need to put freedom and the protection of privacy in advertising and web searches. Hopefully such a project could help generate a lot of cash for the GNU/Linux communities. And, as a later step, perhaps even a sharable ecommerce engine could come of this as well.