Not OP, but I still think that's acceptable. README.md is one of a very small number of places that open source developers can reach their users. Most of the time I only read it once, so if there's an ad there, or a link to their other products, as long as it's not a GIF and they didn't find some way to embed a tracker in README.md, I'm cool with it.

It's about as relevant as advertising gets, and it's not coming from a pool of clickbait ads. It's a developer using their open source work to generate interest in the work that pays for it.

As an open source developer, I would refuse to "reach" my users in such a tacky way as selling ad space in my README. You're correct that the README is one of the few touch points with users, and I wouldn't dare waste that on something I consider so disrespectful.

Oh, I'm not talking about selling ad space. I agree that what Funded did was misguided at best. But what my parent was responding to was the idea of even putting a little ad for a paid product by the same developer or company.

If JetBrains, for example, wanted to remind me on the README for Kotlin that they have an IDE that works well with the language, that doesn't offend me.

> perhaps even a tracking one

Tracking the campaign? Yes, probably. But tracking you? How do you expect that to work?

Making ads contextual to the place they are and tracking the campaigns to discover what works and what doesn't is how it should be done.

I presume the user is assuming you could put a tracking pixel in the readme and have it rendered, the same way the build badges work. Github is, of course, one step ahead and hides those behind camo.githubusercontent.com.

An affiliate link, I suppose. Which is annoying, as these are practically spam.