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

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

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

Sorry about that.

> 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.

I was talking about the normal sponsorship dues

> $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.
>

This is a good point. I didn't think about it that way

> 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.

Yeah.

So you are proposing that people in the advisory board should pay more
that people that are just sponsors?


>> 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.

Agree.

> 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

Thanks for the pointer to that article. Was fun to read.

> 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.
>

What according to you should be the concrete proposal besides the
sponsorship proposal you gave


Jaap