Re: Kudos, Sponsors, Comments

Robert,

> Well, back when it was on advocacy, the idea (as I understood it) was
> to
> recognize those companies the truly sponsor our development, and by
> sponsor I
> do mean money, since afaik Tom/Jan/Bruce etc all get paid in actual
> money by
> these companies to hack on PostgreSQL.

Hmmm? How is this any less actual money than the money CMD spent to
develop trigger-safe pl/perl, or the billable time Dave C. gives up to
work on JDBC, or other code contributions? Sure, paying a full-time
salary for someone to hack on PostgreSQL full-time is *more* money, but
it's not *different* money.

If we want to just list companies that employ full-time programmers to
contribute to PostgreSQL, as a threshold of amount, then we should be
clear about that.

> Another thing to think about is just how this will play once the
> foundation is
> up and running, since we will have a listing of "sponsors" there too.

Precisely. And that's why I'm worried about confusing the issue.
"Sponsor" has some specific meanings in fundraising and American
English; it refers to a cash donor (of a substantial amount, usually),
or someone who underwrites the expenses for another person to
participate in something. By the latter definition, RH, SRA and
Fujitsu could loosely be considered to be sponsors but
Hub.org/PostgreSQL Inc. would not. The word "contributor" is much
broader.

If we plan on seperating the fundraising activities of the foundation
from the development activities of PostgreSQL.org, then it's probably a
good idea to use language that doesn't confuse the two things. If your
concern is to only list the companies who contribute major resources,
then we can simply call them "major contributors".

If you want an illustration of the confusion that the word "sponsor"
causes, just see the discussion where I unwisely used it on the
advocacy list last month.

> We stated it before and I'll restate it now, as soon as someone comes
> up with
> logos for those companies, they can be added to the list.

I really want a cohesive policy about who gets listed and who doesn't
before we start adding people ad-hoc. How much, in code/resource/time
contributions, is required to get listed?

If we put up language, NOW, that makes it clear that this is not a
complete list of corporate contributors, that gives us time to agree on
a policy. The current language implies that the list is complete,
which could be offensive to some companies who have contributed a lot
and are not yet listed.

> Isn't this the 4th thing? ;-)

Nope, it's the 3rd. Count again ;-)

> This was discussed before, the quick
> summary
> being that folks didnt think people on pgsql-docs would want to see
> them and
> since the people doing the moderating were all on this list no one
> really
> wanted to subscribe to yet another list.

Well, I'm not clear on why *anyone* needs to see them on a mailing
list, but I can easily filter them. So don't worry about me.

--Josh

______AGLIO DATABASE SOLUTIONS___________________________
Josh Berkus
Complete information technology josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com
and data management solutions (415) 752-2500
for law firms, small businesses fax 752-2387
and non-profit organizations. San Francisco