I'm not sure this is a policy the ASF would approve of. I don't think I have ever seen this type of sponsorship in any ASF project. As you know ASF works on the basis of merit where contributions are rewarded on an individual basis. Personally I would be strongly against this form of partnership where the only cooperative structure is a material one. If XMLMind is interested in cooperation of the kind we do at the ASF, then the first step would be to make their product ASL or compatible.
FYI this has been done before and has never been a problem at the ASF AFAIK. IBM has been giving away hardware. No one complained. It's sponsoring.
We at the Ant PMC have been given Intellij IDEA licenses for all committers of the project per request. For about 3 years now I think.
Many moons ago, at the beginning of the Gump experiment I also contacted WebGain so that we could deploy test coverage and code auditing to all java projects (and I talked about it to Sam), it was on its way when they shut down operations... same about Sitraka and JProbe where I have been asking for free licenses...it was on its way when they were absorbed by Quest. Now considering each time I'm asking something the company is shutdown and absorbed, I'm being silent :)
Plus the panorama is much different than it was many moons ago, there are more open source tools in coverage and audit now.
I think Costin (or is it Remy) also asked for optimizeit license for the tomcat committers. Not sure how it went, you may ask them, but OptimizeIt shows up in the tomcat mailing list every time they speak about optimization.
We have some companies like Atlassian (Jira, Confluence) and Cenqua (Clover) giving away licenses to opensource projects, and this is not for fun. They are using open source products (mostly ASL) but this is giving A LOT of exposure to the product and the company. In terms of marketing this is considerable.
And if it helps people to do a better work with better tools, what's the problem ? until...there are equivalent opensource products.
Stephane
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