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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 different parties 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
-...