My motivation for attempting to add Collabra to the list was with the long-term plan of moving one of my engineers to a full time open source role in response to the additional business that the entry produced. Right now we make the occasional contribution to other Open Source projects but virtually no contributions to Apache (and those were done in employees' own time). If there is enough paid Jakarta work to keep one of my engineers busy for 3 or 4 days a week, the decision to ask him to "find other Jakarta stuff to do" for the rest of his time is an easy one to make.I'm tending towards the argument that if you can convince someone who has the right access to update the vendors.xml page, then you deserve to be on the list.
Perhaps over time, he would get known and accepted in the community and someone would choose to nominate him for committer priviledges. Obviously, that is something that Collabra would have very little control over.
An alternative would be to employ an existing committer (perhaps poaching them from their existing employer). A side-effect would be that they would then be obligated for the most part to work on features that Collabra deems important, rather than what the wider community wants, thus actually reducing the capacity of the Jakarta project to achieve its aims. This goes completely against our corporate philosophy and, IMHO, the spirit of the communtiy and I won't do it.
I guess what I am saying is that we are a small company with limited resources (heck, even Sendmail, Inc. only contributes ~50 man-hours per week to freeware sendmail). We want to help out and give something back to the community (beyond increasing the install base and training users), but we need you to help us help you.
-- Michael Davey Technical Director Collabra Ltd.
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