Crediting sponsors in release notes?

We did a read-through of the 9.1 beta release notes in the AustinPUG meeting last night, and it struck me that a number of those items were actually sponsored by Enova. I thought I'd asked about this before, but I'm not finding it in the archives. What do people think about mentioning sponsors along with patch contributors, something like "(Tom Lane, sponsored by Red Hat)" where now it just says "(Tom Lane)"? (Not saying Tom/RH are looking for this, he's just a convenient example).

I think there's a couple benefits to mentioning sponsorship:

- It provides added legitimacy to the project *in the eyes of businesses* when they see development being funded by other businesses
- It raises awareness that businesses *can* fund development of features/fixes
- It recognizes those who have contributed to development

I can think of a few cons as well...

- Corporate sponsorship could worry some people about the project being controlled by companies
I don't think this would be much of an issue unless prolific contributors (ie: Tom) started crediting their employers. I suspect that most major contributors don't really care about this since nothing's been said before now, but maybe I'm wrong.

- It does add some clutter to the release notes, though I don't think it would really be that bad

What do others think?

Disclosure: I work for Enova, and we would benefit from our sponsorship appearing in the release notes.
--
Jim "Decibel!" Nasby jnasby(at)EnovaFinancial(dot)com
Primary: 512-579-9024 Backup: 512-569-9461