Ross Gardler wrote:
From my blog (http://www.jroller.com/page/rgardler/20050421#commercial_appreciation_of_open_source )
Matthew Langham often posts on the relationships between Open Source projects and commercial organisations profiting from those projects. Usually I find myself agreeing with his views, I did so again today when he said:
"I still think that just linking to an Open Source project from your home-page to "show your appreciation" isn't enough though. That link should be to a page showing just what you have done to give back to the community. Far more effective."
What a great concept. Thinking about the projects I work on most commercial organisations that use the software ?show their appreciation? by adding their names to a ?used by? list. Think about it, this is actually benificial to the company in question as it is another inbound link, often from a fairly high ranked page.
Other companies show their appreciation in much more concrete ways, Matthew lists some of them as "code, time, test-results, documentation, hardware, writing articles about the project", there are of course many more ways (I could really do with some financial support whne I present at ApacheCon Europe this year, as could most of the presenters).
Why should companies who actively support a project and its community get the same ?billing? as those who simply use it? I?m going to discuss this on some of the projects I am involved with and see what we can come up with.
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Well? Should we do anything about this?
What do you suggest that we should do?
The trouble is: Where do we draw the line? The individual persons who contribute patches and those who discuss on the mailing list deserve recognition. The committers who put in many hours of their own time also deserve recognition. It is difficult to be fair to all.
It is very difficult to be fair to all. However, I do not think it is fair when a company is paying someone a committer to work on Forrest and they get the same recognition as someone who just uses Forrest. However, I have not *asked* these companies if they are bothered by this (I myself an am independent so I can assure you there is no hidden agenda here).
I feel quite sure this will have been discussed elsewhere within Apache in the past. So I may be digging up old ground, and it may be that there is no fair way of doing things. Nevertheless, Matthew highlighted it in his blog and I thought he had an excellent point.
Anyway, I have attached three messages between Matthew and I from private communications that resulted form my comment on his blog (copied with his permission and CC'd to him).
Ross
--- Begin Message ---Hey Ross,
I read your comment on my post. Obviously providing financial support for speakers at ApacheCon is another good idea - but anyone doing that would want "something in return". Especially if that is a commercial entity. There is no free lunch after all. So would the speakers who receive funding be prepared to
- add a logo to their title slide - wear a t-shirt with the sponsor logo on - or just mention them in passing during the presentation?
What do you think would work for both sides? Again it's that balance I talk about that would be important here too.
Matthew
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- Matthew Langham wrote:Hey Ross,
I read your comment on my post. Obviously providing financial support for speakers at ApacheCon is another good idea - but anyone doing that would want "something in return". Especially if that is a commercial entity. There is no free lunch after all. So would the speakers who receive funding be prepared to
- add a logo to their title slide - wear a t-shirt with the sponsor logo on - or just mention them in passing during the presentation?
What do you think would work for both sides? Again it's that balance I talk about that would be important here too.
I'm not keen on the idea of additional visibility for a sponsor since there are many other companies that pay for developers time directly, they should get credit too. This is why I liked your idea of a page that describes just what a company has done for the project. The company can then link to that page as a "certificate of participation", as you say in your blog this is an important marketing tool for any Open Source based company.
When I wrote the ApacheCon comment I was thinking specifically of some companies that I know use Forrest, but do not involve themselves with the community. Since my presentation is about Forrest and one of its goals is to bring more people into the community to ensure that the product continues to develop and be maintained, I would have thought there is a fairly obvious payback for those companies. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of these companies would not understand that payback.
Perhaps we could have a page for each "category" of support from companies. Categories would be things like "Community Development" (things like sponsoring ApacheCon presentations), "Testing" (maintenance of bug reports), "Maintenance" (submission of patches etc.), "Documentation" (including 3rd party articles) and "Development" (payment for committer).
This is still a long way from perfect since there still no prioritising of sponsors with respect to the scale of their contribution (this would be a nightmare to manage in a fair way). However, it is a vast improvement over the current "used by" list since the number of links on each page would be greatly reduced thereby making them more visible on the page and increasing the value of the inbound link to their site.
Maintenance shouldn't be a problem as most communities track this kind of activity anyway as part of their community management process (i.e. keeping an eye on who should be proposed as a committer).
WDYT?
(can I post your comments to the Forrest Dev list as I just posted my blog there to see if we want to do anything along these lines)
Ross
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
I'm not keen on the idea of additional visibility for a sponsor since there are many other companies that pay for developers time directly, they should get credit too. This is why I liked your idea of a page that describes just what a company has done for the project. The company can then link to that page as a "certificate of participation", as you say in your blog this is an important marketing tool for any Open Source based company.
Exactly.
Perhaps we could have a page for each "category" of support from companies. Categories would be things like "Community Development" (things like sponsoring ApacheCon presentations), "Testing" (maintenance of bug reports), "Maintenance" (submission of patches etc.), "Documentation" (including 3rd party articles) and "Development" (payment for committer).
This would be interesting to set up on an Apache-wide scale, as companies are often involved in several projects (we are for example). So one idea would be to have a page on Apache - such as a link from the "Support the Apache Software Foundation" section of the home-page. That could then be a link to a list of companies and from there individual links to a company page listing the things you mention. This would raise the visibility of individual "supporting" companies and consolidate the "used by" links into a single page of detail.
Maintenance shouldn't be a problem as most communities track this kind of activity anyway as part of their community management process (i.e. keeping an eye on who should be proposed as a committer).
This leads to the question of would be able to edit that information. The easiest way would be a wiki page where each company can maintain the information. This leads to potential misuse problems (but it would be public so maybe not a problem) and the typical wiki problems - defacing etc.
(can I post your comments to the Forrest Dev list as I just posted my blog there to see if we want to do anything along these lines)
Sure!
Matthew
--- End Message ---
