Re: question about the PEAR "fund" / sponsors

Joe Stump wrote:

I remember a while back someone posted information about a PEAR fund being set up. My question, as someone who provides PHP services, is the PEAR group interested in sponsors for the PEAR sites, etc? On php.net their advertising policy is (in bold and italics) that they don't want any, which makes no sense to me since the money could be used for: 1.) Paying developers to program open source code 2.) Various contests 3.) Conference/trade shows 4.) Hosting, bandwidth, etc. So, what's the PEAR group's stance on this? I'm not saying popups and crap like that. What are other open source projects doing out there?

Since you didnt mail this to the pear group I presume you were more looking for an individual stance than a uniform group answer. What the group has done to date: We are generally very open to sponsoring. As a matter of fact I have sponsored t-shirts (with my company logo on them) and s&s have sponsored the recent flyer printing (also with their logo on them). We are also open to providing links on pear.php.net back to people who provide ressources about PEAR. So to take your list one by one 1) I dont mind people making initial contact on pear mailinglists, but it should just be an initial mail. 2) contests are great and should surely get a nice link in the news section 3) sponsoring is great! for the booth or even to send people to conferences (especially community conferences like linuxtag/fosdem/ect) 4) afaik we are well covered by what pph.net offers us .. so I dont see a need to diverge there .. once we have mirroring support for the pear installer then we should explore finding additional hosts, but even then we would be look together with pecl/internals A final note: So far we have not setup an official fund as the entire fund consists if 144 euros (iirc) earned by the pear group. This may change however in the future, but there are no concrete plans. To keep things simple for all parties for now I would prefer to go with direct sponsoring. That being said there is currently some people pondering the creation of a not for profit organization for php in germany. If this gets setup it might be worthwhile to explore joining this project. Anyone seriouisly interested in this please email me privatly and I will make the necessary contacts. But please refrain from discussing this topic on this list. The issue needs seriously dedicated people and not people writing emails on this list. This will just discourage the serious people as they see other people discuss the topic to death. Hmm maybe we should get a sponsor to donate a whip for every pear developer so he can whip himself if he replies to the not for profit thing on the list (or tab vs spaces for that matter). regards, Lukas Smith smith@backendmedia.com _______________________________ BackendMedia www.backendmedia.com berlin@backendmedia.com Linn Zwoch Smith GbR Pariser Str. 44 D-10707 Berlin Tel +49 30 83 22 50 00 Fax +49 30 83 22 50 07