Corporate sponsorship ( was Re: Going passive )

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 09:56:56PM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 11/09/2010 02:35 PM, Adam Miller wrote:
> > Red Hat employs many Fedora contributors in order to contribute specifically
> > to Fedora and that should be encouraged, not scoffed at. Red Hat also funds
> > almost 100% of the infrastructure that allows those of us who contribute to
> > contribute as well as their funding for all the ambassador efforts and many
> > many other bits throughout the Fedora scape.
> 
> I'm a bit curious on how do other companies/sponsors fit into the 
> equation...
> 
> Let' s say we have the acme corporate and it wants to match Red Hat's 
> funds and contribution if not do more.
> 
> What can acme do and not do regarding Fedora besides pouring manpower 
> and money into the project ?
> 
> For instance if acme wanted to donate hw that was twice as big and 
> diverse than what Red Hat provides to the project with the term that 
> they would be hosting it and the infrastructure along with it would that 
> be acceptable?
> 
My understanding is that this would be largely acceptable.  The Fedora team
(Infrastructure, releng, packagers) would likely need to be very involved in
figuring out the exact ways that such a merging of resources would take
place and whether it would be useful (for instance, some company donating
hardware for a secondary arch but not putting in any of manpower to run the
servers, paying for bandwidth, electricity, or rackspace to host the
hardware might end up being told that the contribution of the hardware isn't
useful by itself).

A very large donation might have other ramifications that I would imagine
are largely positive, but seeing as companies that have donated to this have
all been of a more moderate level (a few servers with hosting at remote
facilities, allocation of people at remote facilities to provide hands-on
technicians if needed, etc) we haven't had to deal with that.

-Toshio
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