On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 08:38:42AM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > > If other people find that it *had almost nothing to do* with DebConf, > > please tell us. > > As currently planned, Debconf 13 has nothing to do with a conference you > would ask sponsorship to a fortune 500 company for. You mean those companies that from time to time send their managers and teams to spend time in the woods, sleeping in tents, because it's so good for "team building"? :-) </joke> Jokes aside, over the past years I've spoken with representatives of those companies, discussing their interests in supporting financially Debian --- by sponsoring DebConf or by donating to Debian over the year. My personal bottom line is that the kind of "gain" they look for when sponsoring us is different than the usual "advertisement to get new customers" gain that you often find at technology conferences. Several of those companies asked me, at the time of evaluating whether to sponsor Debian or not, questions like "how can we turn our money into code?". Companies that ask those usually rely on the well being of Debian and want to make sure their money help volunteers having fun improving our OS. It's some sort of strategic investment. Or, for the more cynical, they simply have an already approved budget for "FOSS sponsoring" and they need to distribute it among well reputed FOSS projects. Granted, the choice of DebConf venue (and way more so the choice of country) will have an impact on companies that do hope to get new customers by sponsoring a conference. We might lose some of them. But at the end of the day, what we should care about money-wise is whether the conference budget is sustainable or not. If it is, I wouldn't care much about whether it has been assembled by a handful of fortune 500 companies, a long tail of small-ish companies, or funding by public administrations. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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