Re: Crediting sponsors in release notes?

Hi!

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Nasby, Jim <JNasby(at)enovafinancial(dot)com> wrote:
> 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?

The overhead of tracking who sponsored what on a feature-by-feature
basis in release notes seems beyond what volunteers can be expected to
keep track of. I also wouldn't want to have developer time spent on
resolving conflicts in release notes about who sponsored what.

Individuals and companies are free to publicize this on their own, and
I would love to see companies taking release notes, and writing their
own press releases that detail the features that their company paid
for.

What we could do at a project level is publish a press release that
details the companies that sponsored features in the last release. If
we could get cooperation and help collecting the information from the
companies involved, I think this would be a very nice addition to the
press packets that are created for major releases.

I'd say at least 10 companies need to document this for it to be worth
the effort involved in collecting and distributing the information.

-selena

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