Re: Kudos, Sponsors, Comments

On Thursday 23 December 2004 19:53, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> > > 1) I'd like to change this from "sponsors" to "corporate contributors".
> > > Sponsors implies money and we want to list code contributors as well
> > > -- if not primarily. We can keep the URL of the page, just change the
> > > title.
> >
> > 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.
>
> I don't see how hiring someone to work on PostgreSQL is more
> "money"-like than contributing resources, time, or code.

As with most things in life "it depends" :-) Over the years when I've sent in
a few patches and fix a few bugs in various projects, there were things I
uncovered in the course of doing work for someone so I contributed back those
changes, but that wasn't my employers end goal. I think a lot of people who
work on the project professionally are like this, they work on things as
needed to get thier other jobs done, and thier contributions are added with
others and this makes the open source world go round. However, this is
different from a company who says to an employee "your primary job is to work
on postgresql". Even if that work is directed (like jan and arc or some of
the changes neil is working on now) having those full time developers is
really a huge boost to the community, and something I am sure we would all
like to see more of.

Now, is that enough to split hairs over? Maybe not, but again, as the
discussion went on -advocacy, it's a slippery slope when you through out a
blanket "anyone who contributes resources, time or code". A good example?
Arkeia could claim they are contributing to the community by integrating
postgresql support into thier product. This is a donation of resources since
they will be putting out press releases with our name in it, spreading the
cword on postgres to the 4 corners. I willing to bet a few people have
decided not to use postgresql since it didn't have an "enterprise backup
solution", and now thanks to Arkeia, we do (at least thats the story that
will be sold to some phb's).

As Josh pointed out though, maybe it is better to list a 500 companies that
have any involvement with postgresql rather than only 10 who are really
integral to making things happen...

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL