Subject: Re: On Sponsor Notices

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0200

Petr Baudis wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
>   to follow up a little on the "This patch has been sponsored by
> Novartis" messages - I have been on a summer internship at Novartis busy
> deploying Git and these patches (still quite a few more to come, mostly
> for gitweb) have been one of the main outputs of that work.
> 
>   However, I'm not sure if acknowledging the Novartis-originated patches
> in the log message like this is the best practice and we will understand
> if the maintainers will decide to strip these notices when applying the
> patches. Usually, this kind of acknowledgement is made by using
> "sponsored" email addresses, however mine will probably stop working
> shortly after I leave and the only way to read it is, shall we say,
> utmostly inconvenient. ;-) Now, Shawn has proposed 'Sponsored-by:' line
> at the header footer, which is also an interesting possibility.
> 

I like the "Sponsored-by" idea. I work for a company that sponsors quite
a lot, and I thoroughly enjoy the idea that I can one day go to my boss
and say "hey, our company name is clearly visible here. We've sent this
many patches that got accepted upstream", and that other companies can
see that too.

As for the legal S-o-b stuff, I'd say a combination like this:
Sponsored-by: Example <[email-masked]>
Signed-off-by: Casper Intern (for Example) <[email-masked]>

should work wonderfully. I know the guys holding the money like to see
the company name so it's a good thing to do to get a company to sponsor
development further, while the S-o-b marks the person responsible for
posting the patches to the project.

Just my €0.02.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231