Re: New PostgreSQL Sponsorship Criteria

On Oct 14, 2013, at 11:54 AM, Jean-Paul Argudo wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> 1st, thanks to the PostgreSQL Sponsorship Committee for their work. If I had to write some kind of comments, I'll do the same ones Magnus did. So basically, it's a big +1 on Magnus' mail here.
>
> But:
>
> Le vendredi 11 octobre 2013 à 11:13 -0700, Josh Berkus a écrit :
>>
>> On 10/11/2013 11:03 AM, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
>> > "an organization that employs two major contributors with permission to contribute to PostgreSQL"
>> >
>> > I would like to add something with "on company time" or "as part of their organizational requirements" but that sentence may be enough in itself. The point is that the organization provides the major contributor(s) the time to do so
>>
>> Well, the idea was to distinguish between contributors who are allowed
>> to spend 4 hours/week on PostgreSQL by their companies, and contributors
>> who spend more like 25hours/week of company time. We have both kinds,
>> and from a sponsorship perspective, they're not equally valuable.
>
> I completely agree here.
>
> Still, we'll face a problem : how will the Commitee control that? Who will be responsible of such a control?
>
> As an axample, I can speak for Dalibo. We have all kind of contributions. We have a general rule of 20% worktime dedicated to research and development, including community stuff, but also internal stuff. The rule is quite approximative... Some do 100% community, others way less, since we have also internal projects for our people to work on.
>
> Ah, and, others do community stuff apart from the worktime too, I mean at night and week-ends. Sure they are free of doing what they want, at least in the non-working hours, but also on some of the working-hours.....
>
> Also lots of us do community tasks at work too, most of the time its a big mix between business and community...
>
> So calculating for Dalibo's time contribution is quite a nightmare, including for myself. So I don't even think about anyone on this list :-D
>
> So basically my objection is that we drop the examples, and let the general rules apply, as the Committee can freely decide ?

+1

The main idea behind the examples was to provide clarity to the points above, but it seems like we are causing more confusion than not :-) The goal is to encourage organizations to allow their participants to work on Postgres and thus contribute to the community, and the feedback I am getting is that the examples might be counter to that, particularly with using time contributions as a metric.

Ultimately the criteria itself allows the committee enough flexibility and transparency to make the sponsorship decisions.

Jonathan