From ec05d7ee834dc6a03735791f8a7e4feacaf37e00 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lars Wirzenius Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2022 14:57:28 +0200 Subject: drop: sponsored by, moved to liw.fi --- sponsored-by.md | 69 --------------------------------------------------------- 1 file changed, 69 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 sponsored-by.md diff --git a/sponsored-by.md b/sponsored-by.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1b96572..0000000 --- a/sponsored-by.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ -# 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 ` -* `Sponsored-by: Wikimedia Foundation` -* `Sponsored-by: IBM ` - - ---- -title: Sponsored-by in git commit messages -author: L.W. and D.S. -documentclass: report -... -- cgit v1.2.1