[Kolab-devel] Company Credits in About and Webpages

[Bernhard Reiter]

It is always a delicate question how to credit the contributors
properly and company offers around a Free Software project.
So I'd though I just writeup some of my thoughs in here:

Three companies started the Kolab project (with the kroupware contract
and know continuing with the kolab2 contract)
  Erfrakon, Intevation, Klarälvdalens
Later Codefusion joined the project.
It happens that only people from the four companies have CVS write
access on the kolab CVS. I consider them part of the Kolab (development) team.

We have people from other  companies helping and friendly companies
in general:

* Joon from Radely Network Technologies actively works with us to 
define a usable common format. (See the format list.)
* Thomas from Cable and Wireless (for help with zfos and openpkg)
* Mandrake packages stuff (without much coordination)
* Konsec contributed code to CSSify the Kolab1 webpages once.
There are other additional offerings for Kolab, too.

My suggestion would be that if we advertise commercial (not proprietary)
service offering for Kolab on our webpage, we should advertise the companies that 
massively give back to Kolab which are the ones in the development team.
As for proprietary plug-in (and other) offerings we should stay neutral, 
and give people some keywords.

If we would ever list companies not actively involved with Kolab development
I think they should be measured towards the GNU Business Network criteria (still
in draft).

My rational behind this is that kolab.org is a Free Software project website
and this project definately profits from having commercial support available
(it only exists because of companies doing commercial Free Software).
On the other hand if people spend money to buy a solution with Kolab
contracting someone, it is only (morally) fair if something is given back 
to the project. The companies in the development team have demonstrated
best that they contribute to the Free Software community and it should
not be too easy for other to buy their listing with a one time contribution.

(This post got longer than expected.)
Opinions?
Bernhard


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