I know Planet Ubuntu might not be the best place to bring this up, but I feel that the bug report for bug number 268447 is not the right place for the more abstract discussion that seems to be needed. If there is already a discussion on a mail list somewhere that I have missed, please point me in the right direction.
The bug report in short points out that a link to the commercial service Landscape is added to the Message Of The Day by the landscape client. However, Landscape is not a free service.
There seems to be (at least) two sides to this bug. The first is who gets to modify the MOTD? As a client user logging in to a server, information about Landscape is completely irrelevant to me. Information about Landscape might be relevant to the server administrator, but not to every user of the system. So maybe the link should not go there? Imagine what would happen if every program go to modify the MOTD. The size of the MOTD could easily balloon to a point where the MOTD becomes useless.
The other issue is what kind of commercial services can be advertised in general.
How long until we see adds about new Firefox plugins or Crelm Toothpaste in the MOTD or somewhere else?