Re: Premium sponsor ship offerings [WAS Re: recruiting sponsors]

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

This feels like reflex replying to remake the same point I made earlier, 
but anyway...

Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
> > How about something more like this:
> >
> > $3000 <= 10 employees or $1M revenues
> > $10000 <= 50 employees or $5M revenues
> > $20000 > 50 employees or $5M revenues
>
> Many private companies don't want to disclose their revenues so I'd
> leave that out.

This is the type of structure (orders of magnitude different but...) 
that the Eclipse Foundation has. Revenue/size calculations are on an 
honour basis. 
http://www.eclipse.org/membership/become_a_member/membershipTypes.php

> Furthermore in this case if you are 11 people you
> already pay 10K, which is a lot for such a small company.

If we're talking about advisory board dues (and again, I'm not sure 
which thing you're talking about with these packages), you're a 
strategically aligned company with GNOME, and you have 11 employees, 
then you're probably a company like Collabora - maybe Openismus is up to 
11 now too? and your annual revenues are likely to be between $500K and 
$1M per year. Or you're a company like Litl (or Canonical in 2004-05), 
and you don't have any revenues yet.

$10K is a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but it's an investment which 
will give a return for companies like Collabora and Openismus, because 
the companies who spend money on developing their software will likely 
also be in the room in the advisory board meetings, when they're talking 
about things that should be invested in for the GNOME platform. And for 
companies like Canonical and Litl, it's important to be able to 
influence what people are investing in - whether it's Novell, Red Hat, 
Intel, or volunteer effort in the community. What we've seen in recent 
times is that there is more direction coming from corporate sponsored 
development by companies like OpenedHand, Nokia, Red Hat, Novell, 
Canonical, etc... than there is from community volunteer efforts. A 
company like Litl can definitely benefit from a dual approach - 
co-ordinating with bigger companies to help set direction, while working 
actively within the community (as they are doing) to ensure that their 
priorities are taken into consideration. Given the annual budget of 20 
developers, $10K doesn't seem much for access to that influence.

If we're talking about an annual donation, then I agree with you, for a 
company that is a fan of, but not really aligned with, GNOME (someone 
like SilverOrange or maybe Dupedi (Belgian GNOME user, 75 employees), 
$10K is too much to ask, but $3K is entirely reasonable/possible.

> For the normal sponsorship I would be opposed to only have size of the
> contribution matter. Many small shops are really important for the
> further development of GNOME and relatively contribute a lot of code
> to GNOME compared to large multinationals.

This is what makes me think that you're conflating advisory board & 
donors. The small shops that are very important for the further 
development of GNOME should be encouraged to join the advisory board. 
The large multinationals not contributing much code to GNOME should be 
encouraged to give us as much money as possible in return for the value 
we give them. The small companies who get some benefit from GNOME should 
also be encouraged to give us as much as possible.

A serious question: will anyone give money to GNOME because of the 
things they get? Or will the things they get help grease the wheels? I 
can imagine a few different scenarios here.

CTO: "We have 200 people using GNOME internally - we're already paying 
for a support package to Red Hat, but I'd like to give some money to the 
GNOME Foundation to support their good work. What do you think?"
CFO: "Sure, why not. How much are we talking about?"
CTO: "$10,000"
CFO spits coffee on keyboard. "You're kidding me? You want to give 
$10,000 for software we're already paying for?"
CTO: "Hold on, hold on... there's a package. We get our logo up on the 
GNOME website as a sponsors, we get to meet the GNOME Foundation 
executive director, we get to take part in the annual GNOME User 
Meeting, and we can call into a monthly conf call to get latest product 
plans and vote on the bugs that are important to us!"
CFO: "Oh, if you put it like that..."

Here's a second possible conversation:

CTO: "How about we give some money to those fine folk in the GNOME 
Foundation?"
CEO: "How much do they want?"
CTO: "$10,000, and we get our logo on the website and in their annual 
report as a donor, and an invitation to attend the GNOME Users Summit to 
talk about the issues we have."
CEO: "$10,000? I was talking to a buddy who got all that last month, and 
they only gave $3,000. what gives?"
CTO: "Well, they're smaller than us."
CEO: "Oh, if you put it like that..."

People don't like paying more just because they can afford to. Joel 
Spolsky talks about this in his article on how to fix the price of a 
service or product: 
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html

You need an "enterprise version", a "home version" and a "student 
version" of GNOME sponsorship, but the key is that they can't be the 
same thing, or the big guys won't give.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org