No strings attached sponsorship is a given to build a succesful, inclusive community.
I am skeptical, however, about too many companies contributing just for the goodwill from having observed and worked with similar foundations - Linux Foundation and Eclipse Foundation. In my experience, successful foundations are built around multiple of the following:
- Shared engineering (lower the costs to solve common problems in commodity portions of the software stack)
- Neutral standards body or reference implementation (starts with a member contributing a body of code under the foundation’s governance)
- Incubating new technology (similar to IETF, working on broad areas such as security, automotive, toolchains, etc.)
- Code hosting (related to 1, 2, but with a focus on maintainership, CI and build server infrastructure, enterprise git hosting features)
- Shared labs (specialised HW hosting for specific projects)
- Event management (Hosting conferences)
- Developer ecosystem (Supporting and training initiatives for developers)
- Visibility to attract the best talent (companies risk getting ignored by the best candidates if they aren’t seen as contributing back to FOSS)
- Community management systems (Elections, Voting, capturing and publishing minutes, SOPs, etc. that goes into ensuring a smoothly functioning community)
Of these, I see bits of 6, 7, 8. at Foss United. Could they be made more emphatic with the help of 1 thru 5?
We don’t need to be striving towards another LF or EF, but it would be good to have a definition of success.