Re: [guadec-list] [Reminder] GUADEC committee meeting on 16 January 2012 UTC 16:00

[Bob Murphy <bobert lavitanuova com>]

On Jan 18, 2012, at 2:37 AM, Dave Neary wrote:

> Past sponsors not on the advisory board and former advisory board members include the likes of HP, Supersonic Imagine, Fluendo, TI, AMD, Linux Foundation, Lanedo, ACCESS, LiMo, Mandriva (could try Mageia), and Openismus.

I used to work for ACCESS, and to the best of my knowledge, they're no longer doing much or any work with GNOME technologies. In any case, I doubt they'd be a good candidate for sponsorship now.

> Other potential sponsors, related to recent strategic moves, would be Samsung (we would need to make a case for the relevance of GUADEC to Tizen), ST Micro, Freescale, Qualcomm (or QuIC), (for all of these we need to strengthen our ARM story), CodeThink.

A few more possibilities, both for GUADEC sponsorship and being on the GNOME advisory board:

Lab126, the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle. Their open-source tree shows they use a ton of GNOME technologies in the Kindle, including GTK+ and WebKitGTK. Some contact names there are Saldy Antony (manages WebKit development), David Berbessou (Director of Engineering), and Howard Look (VP Software).

TouchTunes is a Montreal-based company that uses GNOME technologies to build digital jukeboxes. Contacts there are Francois Beaumier (Director, Music Applications Development) and Michael Tooker (senior VP for technology and operations).

Linaro is a consortium of ARM chip companies and related software firms that supplies and promotes a common Linux development platform. Contacts include Michael Opdenacker (Community Manager) and Christian Reis (VP of Engineering).

Tivo's open-source tree shows they use some lower-level GNOME technologies including libxml2 and libxslt. A contact there is Karl Glynn (Senior Director, Software Engineering).

Garmin used GNOME technologies in their GPS devices in 2009, but it's not clear whether they're still doing it.

> Typically for sponsors, we have, in the past 2-3 years, preferred a model where we think holistically about how much money we ask companies for during the year, through the board, and have the Executive Director handle these relationships. Stormy did this in the past, and I'm sure she would help Karen out in doing the same again this year.


This is a great way to do things. I had considered approaching some of the companies around Silicon Valley, but didn't want to interfere with any other money-raising activities with the same companies, and in any case I'm going to be unable to do anything like that for a couple of months.

Best regards,
Bob