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

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

A data point from the Friends of GNOME survey[1], most people that gave money were not GNOME Foundation members. Less than 5% were GNOME Foundation members, less than 20% were contributors and many said they donate money because they can't contribute code. 

So asking corporations who use our software but don't participate in the community might be a good idea.

Stormy

[1] My mail with results is stuck awaiting moderation - I have a request into the sys admin team.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 2:53 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

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