Re: Can (Podling) Projects collect funds through certification programs?

In general, the ASF does not accept targeted donations, nor does it
allow it's projects (or podlings) to perform their own independent
fundraising activities. Our general fundraising policy is that any
donations are to the ASF as a whole, and not to individual projects or
podlings.

Our projects/podlings are certainly welcome to link to and encourage
users to visit our Donations or Sponsorship pages.

http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html

As other IPMC members have noted separately, projects/podlings may have
a separate page on their sites that lists various third parties who
offer services, consulting, training, certification, or the like around
their specific software product; that may include commercial third
parties. Such listings should *not* be advertisements - they should be
links with brief descriptions (or similar) that are useful to users or
contributors to that particular project/podling's software or community.

Does that all help?

A useful page to read about how a PPMC might decide what links to put on
pages like this is here:

http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html

Healthy Apache projects recognize that having an ecosystem of volunteers
and commercial companies working on/with/around their software is
helpful both for our users and for the Apache project itself. We are
happy to let our user communities know about the work of these other
volunteers and companies - as long as it's done in a factual way, and
doesn't imply endorsement or approval of any specific companies over
other ones.

- Shane

On 2011-12-13 5:23 AM, seba.wagner@gmail.com wrote:
> How does the ASF deal with requests from companies that would like to get a
> certificate as reseller of a software?
>
> Are (Podling) Projects allowed to organize a "Certification" program for
> distributors and collect funds for their project that way?
>
> Collecting funds that way is a common way of Open Source projects, also
> Apache has a sponsor page et cetera. However the companies listed there
> contribute to the Foundation in general.
> The question is if each project of the foundation additionally can have its
> own Gold, Silver, et cetera Sponsorship program.
> Or for example can collect funds from a list of "partners" similar to for
> example http://moodle.com/partners/list/
>
> Thanks
> Sebastian

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