On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 08:38:42AM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
If other people find that it *had almost nothing to do* with DebConf,
please tell us.
As currently planned, Debconf 13 has nothing to do with a conference you
would ask sponsorship to a fortune 500 company for.
You mean those companies that from time to time send their managers and
teams to spend time in the woods, sleeping in tents, because it's so
good for team building? :-) /joke
Jokes aside, over the past years I've spoken with representatives of
those companies, discussing their interests in supporting financially
Debian --- by sponsoring DebConf or by donating to Debian over the
year. My personal bottom line is that the kind of gain they look for
when sponsoring us is different than the usual advertisement to get new
customers gain that you often find at technology conferences.
Several of those companies asked me, at the time of evaluating whether
to sponsor Debian or not, questions like how can we turn our money into
code?. Companies that ask those usually rely on the well being of
Debian and want to make sure their money help volunteers having fun
improving our OS. It's some sort of strategic investment. Or, for the
more cynical, they simply have an already approved budget for FOSS
sponsoring and they need to distribute it among well reputed FOSS
projects.
Granted, the choice of DebConf venue (and way more so the choice of
country) will have an impact on companies that do hope to get new
customers by sponsoring a conference. We might lose some of them. But at
the end of the day, what we should care about money-wise is whether the
conference budget is sustainable or not. If it is, I wouldn't care much
about whether it has been assembled by a handful of fortune 500
companies, a long tail of small-ish companies, or funding by public
administrations.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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