Sponsorships

From: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_cloudmark.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:34:02 -0700

What are people's general views on the idea of this project beginning to accept corporate sponsorships, something like a logo on our page in exchange for financial consideration to offset operating costs? We already accept donations via PayPal, though so far there has been exactly one of those since we made our first release last year.

We've now received such an offer. I don't believe there are any conditions such as creative control or such associated with it; the offer comes from a company that intends to use OpenDKIM in a commercial setting. This is not uncommon; FreeBSD and Apache and probably many others accept such donations to enable continuance of their work. They even have varying degrees of sponsorship in exchange for more prominent display of the sponsor's logo, etc. I imagine there's some unwritten consideration that their bug fixes or feature requests get priority, but obviously with judicious moderation.

Going down this road can theoretically be both good and bad; good because it sustains operations and development and can attract other sponsors or encourage people already using our work to contribute back, and the endorsement is certainly helpful in numerous ways (both of our name and the technologies we espouse), but bad because it may cause the obvious negative perception of commercial influence over open source even where no such influence actually exists.

I'm looking into what it would take to acquire 501c3 status in the US to make such contributions tax-deductible as well, which might attract more of them.

Comments, please!

-MSK
Received on Thu Oct 28 2010 - 19:34:15 PST