Re: New PostgreSQL Sponsorship Criteria - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Oct 12, 2013, at 4:09 AM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:

> On 10/11/2013 07:21 PM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Jonathan S. Katz
>> <jonathan.katz@excoventures.com> wrote:
>>> The PostgreSQL Sponsorship Committee has proposed new criteria for
>>> determining which organizations are considered sponsors for the PostgreSQL
>>> project.  The proposed criteria would take effect on Nov 15, 2013, and are
>>> listed here:
>>>
>>> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/NewDraftSponsorCriteria
>>>
>>> The major change to the criteria, outside of having a detailed list of
>>> criteria, is that we are reducing the different sponsorship types to two
>>> categories: Sponsor and Major Sponsor.  These designations will make it
>>> easier to determine the appropriate level an organization has contributed to
>>> the PostgreSQL community and will be more inline with how we recognize
>>> contributors to the PostgreSQL project.
>>>
>>> Note that financial sponsors for PostgreSQL conferences are not considered
>>> for evaluation of PostgreSQL sponsorship.
>>>
>>> We would like to hear the community's feedback before we start using the
>>> guidelines to determine sponsorship.
>>
>> This looks very well thought out in general, I think, so a "good work"
>> from me :) And I definitely approve of having a clear policy.
>>
>> First, one very quick note - it should probably explicitly list
>> "PostgreSQL Europe" rather than "Postgresql.eu". That's our official
>> name - just as you use the full name for the Canadian organization,
>> and not "postgres.ca.". I could fix that myself, but I think it's
>> probably better if you guys who are actually in charge of the policy,
>> are also in charge of the edits...
>>
>>
>> A few other notes:
>>
>> In the examples at the bottom you refer to "full time contributors".
>> AFAIK, almost *no* PostgreSQL company has two employees that work full
>> time on contributing to PostgreSQL. They all do something else *as
>> well* (which might well be postgresql related). I'm not sure even
>> EnterpriseDB can claim to have that. I'm pretty sure you didn't
>> actually mean it has to be someone working full time on direct
>> contributions though - and in fact, I think it's a strength of our
>> development team in general that large parts of them don't *just* hack
>> on the code, but they actually work with the resulting product as
>> well. So while I'm pretty sure I agree with what you actually mean, I
>> think the wording needs some improvement.
>>
>> I also note that for "Sponsors" it's a "code contributor" but for
>> "Major Sponsor" it's a "contributor". Are those intentionally
>> different?
>>
>> Same for servers - for "sponsor" it has to be a webserver, for "major
>> sponsor" it can be any server - intentional?
>>
>> I also spot "a company which has hosted four servers for PostgreSQL
>> for the last five years. ". I hope that doesn't happen much, since it
>> is a policy of the sysadmin team to *avoid* a situation like that, for
>> redundancy reasons. We currently have one hoster who runs 4 boxes for
>> us and it's I think <5 years at this point, but we are sometimes
>> concerned about having too many eggs in that particular basket. I
>> think it's a bad idea in general to reward something that is not what
>> we're really looking for, so I think that limit should be dropped to
>> maybe two.
>
>
> well even more so - an infrastructure sponsor usually does not have any
> control on what kind of service we end up running on that particular
> box. So specifying "webserver" (which we kinda only have four ot of the
> 50 - something VMs we run) seems rather irritating.

Its' just an example though - In the actual criteria we have a list prefaced by "Hosting and maintaining PostgreSQL
serverarchitecture including:" and a list of different types of servers.  The examples are only there to help
demonstratehow an organization is selected.  At the end of the day it's there to help encourage organizations to
sponsor.

Jonathan