Hi: Yesterday I was cleaning up some of the wiki pages while putting together an application to the Software Freedom Conservancy. I noticed that some of the FAQ entries were questions like "Do I have to be a technical expert to run Evergreen?" with answers like "No, you can hire a commercial company like Equinox to support your Evergreen system.". As the range of companies offering services and support around Evergreen is now broader than that, I replaced those links with a link to a new wiki page: http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faq:evergreen_companies which represents my totally-off-the-top-of-my-head list of companies that offer support and services for Evergreen.
I want to bring that page to the community's attention because I know that there have been great pains taken by other software projects to avoid the impression of bias towards any particular company, while also trying to prevent companies that have no demonstrated expertise in the software from creating a bad name for the software project as a whole. For example, the list of companies that offer professional services for PostgreSQL is here: http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support but to be listed, a company needs to fill out a form (http://www.postgresql.org/support/newprof) and the application to be listed will be checked against the posted policy for approving professional service listings (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/ProfessionalApproval). The policy also includes provisions for removing a listing. I don't know if we need a formal policy or a standardized format like PostgreSQL uses, but I think it's probably a good idea. I wanted to kick off some discussion about it, though, and also invite companies that I haven't listed to add themselves to the wiki page for now; let's keep it to alphabetical order, with just company name and a link to your Web site. If I was to suggest some criteria for a policy for being listed as a professional service provider, I would want to have each company provide evidence of how they have contributed to the community - partially from a demonstration of expertise perspective, and partially from trying to answer the question: "What would be best overall for the Evergreen project?" We can't stop companies from advertising their services outside of the evergreen-ils.org domain, of course, but we do have the ability to control where we direct would-be Evergreen users from the official Web site.
