Thank you, Apache Sponsors!

I just wanted to take time to say thank you to the many financial Sponsors of the ASF.
Thank you, Apache Sponsors!

Our many regular Sponsors pledge to donate a set amount of funds to the ASF annually, and they really deserve some recognition for this. While we very, very much appreciate the many individuals and other businesses who donate funds periodically, Sponsor donations do make up the bulk of the ASF’s annual income. These donations pay for things like bandwidth for our websites and software downloads, servers and racks for our million+ Subversion revisions, hundreds of mailing lists, and other services, and our crack Infrastructure contractors who keep it all running, plus a whole host of other organizational services we provide for all Apache projects.

Some news was made about several new sponsors recently: Huwawei, GoDaddy, Twitter, and Citrix at various levels of sponsorship, and we appreciate all of them.

I wanted to recognize one great quote about one of these sponsorships. Ars Technica covered one of these sponsorship announcements, and there was a very interesting comment thread following the article.

One commenter snarked, in effect, “Twitter isn’t profitable, so you’re really giving other people’s money to Apache”. What struck my eye is the very honest and right-on-the-mark reply from caniszczyk of Twitter, who replied:

As the guy who created and runs Twitter’s Open Source Office, this is spot on. We already contribute heavily to the ASF by actually committing and contributing to the projects we use: Mesos, Cassandra, Lucene, Thrift, Hadoop, Pig, Mahout and more. There are solid engineering resources committed to some of these projects, which some of them its their full time jobs.

As we evolve as a company, we think it’s the right thing to do to give back to the foundation that supports projects which we benefit so much from. As an open source guy for many many years and on a personal note, I don’t think enough companies give back.

In the end, as we grow, we hope we can give back more in the near future.

I won’t pretend that most businesses don’t take giving money away seriously, and will look for their ROI or whatever in deciding (or not) to donate funds to open source projects. But it was just one quick and very well put quote that shows the larger value of the great software the many Apache projects put out that benefit thousands of businesses every day.

Thanks, sponsors!

Published by

Shane

Briefly, Shane is: a father and husband, a friend, a geek, a Member and director of the ASF, a baker, an ex-Loti, a BMW driver, a punny guy, a gamer, and lifelong resident within the 495 belt. Oh, and we have cats.

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