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authorLars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>2021-05-16 11:05:50 +0300
committerLars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>2021-05-16 11:05:50 +0300
commit3fbe745e47e84754d4f4ab7e8cb8925ec6d8c68f (patch)
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+# Executive summary
+
+To make sponsorship of free and open source software more visible, add
+a `Sponsored-By` pseudo-header to git commit messages.
+
+# The problem
+
+Free and open source software is sometimes funded by its authors: they
+work on it in their free time. Sometimes development is funded by a
+company who employs people to develop the software. Sometimes it's
+fully or partially funded by donations or gifts: some party gives
+money to the developers so they can work on the software, but not as
+employment; we call this sponsorship.
+
+Overall, for any particular project, it's unclear how it's funded.
+Sometimes the project makes it clear, but often it's not clear. In a
+large project, with partied funding parts of the work such as the
+Linux kernel, it's hard to keep track of who funds the work. Currently
+it is done by heuristics based on author commit email addresses.
+
+One of the problems is that employment and sponsorship tends to be
+scarce, and difficult to get, and even many important, popular
+software projects do not have people who can work on it full time.
+This hurts the quality of the software, and slows down its development
+significantly.
+
+# A partial solution
+
+We propose that it would help to make sponsorship more obvious. Apart
+from the project's web site, each commit could label the work as
+sponsored using a pseudo-header:
+
+~~~
+Sponsored-by: Example Corp.
+~~~
+
+Any commits done as part of sponsored work would have this. This would
+raise the visibility of sponsorship, thereby hopefully making it more
+interesting to sponsor.
+
+# Specification
+
+We suggest the following specification as a base of discussion:
+
+* sponsorship of work to produce a commit is marked by one or more
+ `Sponsored-by` pseudo-headers in the commit message
+* lack of such a header does not say anything about whether the work
+ was sponsored; use of the header is optional
+* a header only applies to the commit it appears in
+* all headers referring to the same sponsor should try to use the same
+ value so it's easier to collect statistics
+* the value has the same format as a git commit author field; it can
+ be a bare email address, or lack an email address
+* the special value `author` means the work was done without
+ sponsorship
+
+Examples:
+
+* `Sponsored-by: author`
+* `Sponsored-by: Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>`
+* `Sponsored-by: Wikimedia Foundation`
+* `Sponsored-by: IBM <https://www.ibm.com/>`
+
+
+---
+title: Sponsored-By in git commit messages
+author: L.W. and D.S.
+documentclass: report
+...