Re: [HACKERS] Increased company involvement

Jurka,

> One thing that definitely would be nice would be to be able to combine
> funds from various sponsors for various features.  Alone a company can't
> spring for it, but by pooling resources it could get done.  This is a lot
> tougher to coordinate and unless there is a complete spec in place
> different sponsors will pull in different directions.  Other bounty type
> schemes don't seem to produce results, largely from a lack of cash.
> (Here's $500 for two weeks of work).

Actually, I talked to Opensoucexperts.com about this ages ago and they set up
an online bounty system for OSS projects in general. I know that other
players in the OSS space have talked about similar things; also companies
like SRA and CMD are willing to act as development $$$ funnels for
multi-party projects.

> The problem is organization. Who decides who gets what money? What about
> features that are paid for and worked on and not accepted into the
> community codebase? This was something I hoped the PostgreSQL Foundation
> http://thepostgresqlfoundation.org/ would step in and do, but we seem much
> more focused on advocacy efforts rather than developemnt ones.

Unfortunately, pooling funds for development is not something a non-profit can
realistically do in the US without a whole lot of legal/tax help to navigate
US law. Here NPOs are strictly defined as non-commercial. It might make
sense to set up an NPO in another country, such as Australia, where the
regulations on such things are much more liberal. More importantly, the
Foundation is *still* waiting on its NPO paperwork from the IRS, and I really
don't want to do any major fundraising while there's still the possibility we
could be denied.

> Well the backup should come up in a couple of weeks. I know that the new
> pgFoundry is being worked on right now. Josh would have a better idea.

We ran into a problem installing GForge. I don't know if Tom had time to
work on it over the weekend; if not I'll be tackling it tonight.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco