Link to Typesafe?

[retronym]

Would be nice to have a "Commercial support" link or "Part of the Typesafe Platform" mentioned somewhere. Maybe @odersky could suggest the appropriate wording / prominence.

Loving the new front page, BTW!

[heathermiller]

Well, we do advertise Typesafe trainings and events right out front on the front page-- so there are already like 10 link-outs to typesafe.com from scala-lang.org just on the front page alone (they were visible a couple of days ago, I've since hid them until I fix their styling-- when I'm done, Typesafe's name will definitely be noticeable). We also make it "fair" by enabling other companies to make pull requests to add their training dates to our feeds.

I think we've discussed this once before and people were leaning against hyping Typesafe across scala-lang as a central thing. The reasoning at the time was that on the old scala-lang, we already deal with people submitting pages to link to their consulting or training company a bit too much. So to avoid that mess + the drama that goes along with it, our goal was to have just one point of entry for companies to submit promotional material (all of Typesafe's feeds are pulled in automatically). If we were to promote Typesafe in other places on the website as well, then we'd have to worry about other companies making pull requests to promote their company in those locations too. And when we refuse to accept those PRs, there would be advertising drama that we'd like to avoid.

Another issue I thought of-- if we claim on scala-lang that Scala is within Typesafe's "Typesafe Platform" product, meanwhile having to carry the EPFL copyright as Scala's intellectual property owner... I don't know, that might cause problems with EPFL, no? (EPFL hypes Scala all the time, I had to help them with Scala xmas cards this year-- EPFL's Twitter account retweets a bunch of my Scala-related tweets, they're no sleeping giant.)

Anyway-- as the person/lead responsible for how we market Scala on scala-lang, this is what lead to my decision to have things as they are. Stay tuned though, you'll see those 10 or so Typesafe link-outs again shortly when styling is done.

[heathermiller]

Btw, we also have this "Contributions to Scala" page (the hall of fame, currently ugly: http://www2.scala-lang.org:8888/get-involved/scala-fame.html) with three categories: Typesafe, EPFL, and community. Typesafe naturally tops the list, so that's a way to even quantify Typesafe's contributions to Scala.

[retronym]

No problems, just wanted to make sure it wasn't an oversight. (I hadn't really noticed the omission until just now.)

I do think a link to commercial support (as distinct from training) has a place. But we don't have to worry about that right now.

[heathermiller]

So, sure I see your point about the "commercial support" category. Though the point of messiness that came up in the past were all of the little pages that people submitted to us to promote their consultancy/training/books/products that we'd have to accept/deny. Sometimes, it's difficult/sensitive/dramatic on us to refuse some kind of self-promotional submission like that. So, we wanted to avoid it all-together. We thought that the link-outs to Typesafe on the front page + the fact that Typesafe tops the commits to Scala on the contribution page would be still mentioning Typesafe a bunch, but without opening that floodgate.

I like the RedHat/Linux model. Linux has a page for "Corporate Sponsors" which in our case could be only Typesafe. Another option, which I'm a bit afraid of for the aforementioned reasons: there could be a "Commerical Support" link in the footer that links to a page that could list companies (if we make this structured-enough, hopefully it doesn't result in the issues mentioned above). Naturally, Typesafe would be #1 on the list.

In any event, Linux doesn't promote RedHat as the one and only "commercial supporter", which I think is the right thing to do.