Sponsoring enterprise features

Hi folks,

Is there any pre-existing protocol for a company to pay for specific
features to be added to PostgreSQL?

I've gotten full executive buy-in to the idea that it would be far
cheaper to sponsor and pay for people to develop the enterprise features
we need in Postgres than to do an Oracle migration to get those same
features that we need (which would cost unholy amounts of money that we
don't want to spend for our installation). All that said, I don't know
if this is a feasible plan, or what the makeup is of the developers
currently working on Postgres. As a practical matter, we do not have
the time or people to take on this project in-house.

Our company is interested in sponsoring a push to get enterprise-level
scalability features into PostgreSQL, things like partitioning and
organized heaps. As a practical business matter, Oracle is an option but
one of last resort that we (and I) would prefer to avoid if at all
possible. We see an obvious long-term benefit to making Postgres do
what we need it to do than buying gobs of Oracle licenses.

Are other people/companies already doing this, either officially or
unofficially, and what is the general protocol for going about doing
this?

Cheers,

-James Rogers
jamesr(at)best(dot)com