[RFC] Sponsorship Questions

[Daniel Golle]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 07:27:06PM +0300, Hannu Nyman wrote:
> On 20.4.2017 18.32, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
> > So the questions are:
> > 
> > 1) Are you okay with endorsing a 3rd party as offical LEDE sponsor?
> > 2) What are the rules you'd like to lay out for such a sponsorship?
> 
> There should be no exclusive sponsors.
> Having A as a sponsor should not prevent LEDE from taking also A's
> competitor B as a sponsor.
> 
> Nor should the sponsorship status generate any pressure for preferring
> development for devices from the sponsor compared to other vendors.
> 
> Logo visibility and mentioning in the sponsor list sound like reasonable
> benefits to the sponsor.

I agree with all the above. In addition I believe that it makes sense
for labels printed on products to make the assumption that the firmware
found on the device can be reproduced from source or even that it can
be reproduced from the upstream sources on git.lede-project.org.
To me it was very annoying that certain companies used the 'Wrt' or
even 'OpenWrt' name  (obviously to suggest compatibility with OpenWrt)
in their products which actually came with their
in-house fork of OpenWrt. They obviously had to release GPL sources
once the product was sold to consumers, however, usually that in-house
fork contained lots of blobs and was made in a way which could not be
merged into our sources easily because it would not match our
expectations in terms of code quality, or break other things or breach
licences, ... Often that even put the project under pressure because
the unavailability of working drivers disappointed people and that did
hurt the OpenWrt brand in the past imho.
Hence I believe it makes sense to have special requirements for
products to be decorated with the LEDE name or logo, because that's
more than just plain sponsorship. Maybe something like publicly
presenting a detailed plan how support for the hardware is going to be
submitted...?
Maybe that's a separate debate, but then lets make sure that our idea
of sponsorship would not imply that whole mess of expectations...