In a company I work for we have an app that shows TV-programs. Users with a subscription gets the bonus of program descriptions, other users can simply see when the programs start. We have made the data API is public for other developers to do stuff with.
Now my boss wants to give the nonpaying users access to the descriptions for the price of adverts in the app. He also wants to make the app open source. I’ve suggested putting html advertisements in the program descriptions, but he wants real android ad-banners.
I think this creates problems in so many ways. Will Google accept it? Will open source devs accept spending time on a project that creates revenue for someone else? He also wants to obfuscate the part that adds the ads, so people can’t remove it, but that’s not really in terms with the open source definition.
Have you faced similar dilemmas? Are there any ways advertisements in an open source app can work?
Update: Obviously the part that adds the program descriptions to the ad-version of the app would also have to be obfuscated so other people can’t use it.
Advertisement in app is not against any free license that I know of, per-se.
The point of developers not wanting to work on code that generates revenue for someone else does not apply. Free software almost always generates revenue for someone else (think about people working on free software that then gets sold by, for example, Red Hat).
A good way to achieve this is to make a version without ads on which developer work, then taking their code, put the ads in and ship the app with ads.
Also, I don’t see why Google shouldn’t accept it. There’s a lot of apps with ads.
The point about obfuscation is rather tricky. I’m not a lawyer, but I think obfuscating the code struggles a bit with the license. If your boss doesn’t want people to tamper with your app, then he shouldn’t free the code.