Re: Anonymous contributions WAS: PostgreSQL derivatives

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 10:25 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> All,
>
> > > We can do anonymous-only contributions, but that is going to certainly
> > > limit contributions. I am not sure how a company contribution will be
> > > explained to the accounting staff if it has to be anonymous.
>
> As someone with three years professional fundraising and one of a few who
> do the large-gift fundraising for PostgreSQL here in the US, donated
> corporate funds come out of a company's marketing department. As Mal
> Warwick, head of the Bay Area's largest fundraising consulting firm says,
> "Companies' charitible giving budgets are generally less than 1% of their
> marketing budgets." Companies want to stick their names on things.
>
> So, requiring cash donations to be anonymous would basically cut our
> corporate gifts (70% of all money we get) by 99%.

What I've tried to get across here is that its OK to contribute to
Postgres (money or code) and receive credit for doing so, but we
shouldn't accept name sponsorship of official Postgres business.

For example, the President's Annual Speech is never listed as
"President's speech, sponsored by Microsoft", or "The Microsoft
President's Speech". The President may well have accepted public
contributions into his election fund from Microsoft, but that doesn't
mean the Office itself has been purchased in some way.

Mostly we already do this, so when people do official things they use a
neutral email address, for example Josh's recent announcement was made
from PGDG rather than Sun.

If we let that slip, then IMHO it will be a bad thing for the future of
the project, in its current form.

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support