Safe as Milk

GNOME and sponsors

October 11, 2006 1:41 pm Dave Neary gnome

Fernando: Your blog entry just got pointed out to me by Luis. It raises an interesting question about the relationship of GNOME to its main sponsors.

GNOME (through the GNOME Foundation) gets a lot of support from companies – in particular our advisory board members, Sun, Novell, RedHat, HP, IBM, Debian, the FSF, and the more recent additions Nokia, Imendio, OpenedHand, Canonical, PalmSource, Intel and the SFLC.

Part of the problem that we’ve faced in the past is that we go to the well for very concrete things – advisory board dues, GUADEC, the summit, a new server… or a local conference. To the company, it all comes under the heading “GNOME”.

Ideally what would happen is that we would go to the company once, with a detailed list of activities for the year, have one single purchase order for “GNOME”, and then at the end of the year publish an annual report of all the things we’d done with the money (including sponsoring local conferences) to prepare the terrain for the following year.

There are a number of reasons why that might not be a great idea. First, companies might like to support the foundation, but not sponsor one particular conference. Second, we still want to get one-off sponsorship from companies not on the advisory board. Third, all our biggest sponsors will already have their sponsorship bundled up in the foundation, reducing the scope for the organisers.

But the existing situation is untenable – it’s easier for someone to justify a one-off payment of (say) $40,000 than five separate payments for $10,000, $15,000, and 3 x $5,000. So we do need to figure out a better way.

One way to improve things would be to offer sponsorship packages, varying from “Advisory board membership” through to “Deluxe cornerstone strategic partner”. We will need to work out reasonable levels for those packages without making things too complicated, and pitch the idea to advisory board members to work out the details. And of course, it’ll force us to be much more open about what we do – there are a bunch of things that the foundation has helped with this year which either haven’t gotten much attention, or which we haven’t really shouted about. When I get a chance, I’ll make a list…

In short, I’m not surprised that Nokia hasn’t sponsored you, but the foundation’s sponsorship of Fernando’s plane ticket is coming in part from Nokia and their support, so don’t be too hard on them.