Direct funding and grants for the group is not the approach taken by most
opensource projects or in general public internet technology development
communities. Typically its not the group that receives the funding but
individual participants receive support from companies (that may use of
these or other opensource technologies) and provide them with place to
work and/or continue their research. The company then receives publicity
and recognition for their support. This is what I think should be done for
SPF as well and if Microsoft wishes to participate and is willing to hire
somebody and offer him/her work or provide grant without requing the person
to work on what microsoft directs him/her to do but instead allowing the
person full freedom to produce work as part of open standars, then we
should welcome their participation (although I've never before heard of
Microsoft doing this for anybody working for on opensource project or any
other internet standards that do not concern microsoft patented work)
I also don't see any necessity to hire programmer at this time as number
of implementations available for different platforms shows that there is
enough initiative by individuals and companies to be able to support
standards produced for both open source and commercial products. Official
programming work may also overshadow alternative implementations which
may result in loss of interest by maintaners of such implementations and
as a result reduce tecnology innovation.
On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
Folks, I'd like to take a moment to talk about money.
A lot of individuals have put a lot of their own time and
money into doing this work for the good of the public and of
the email industry. We have gotten the ball rolling and
enjoy significant momentum.
Unfortunately, unless we find a source of funding for this
work, some of us may not be able to continue in an active
role. In one possible future, it would be wise to turn
leadership of the project over to a company which has the
resources to see it through.
Microsoft is committed to solving the spam problem, and can
dedicate significant resources toward implementation and
deployment. I am comfortable with the SenderID concept and
think it is sufficient to help solve the problem long-term.
If government and businesses in the email ecosystem are
comfortable with Microsoft assuming a leadership role in the
antispam standards space, and if people agree that the
problem is well on its way to being solved, then there is no
need for funding.
If the open community decide that the work we are doing,
some of which is experimental in nature and goes beyond
SenderID, is worth continuing, then we should try to find
funding for it.
I would like to see about $100,000 in funding by the end
of the year. This money will pay for programmer time,
bandwidth, travel, and other expenses.
I'm looking for a volunteer with experience in grant seeking
to help raise money for our antispam effort.
If you have experience in raising money through grants from
corporations, endowments, or government, please respond to
me and I will explain what we need in more detail.
As a starting point, I found this URL.
http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/reference/grantsref.htm
Getting a grant looks like an achievable goal:
http://www.hitachi.org/grants/
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/about/ac48/about_cisco_grant_program09186a0080156d5a.html
http://www.galeschools.com/grant_goldmine/foundations/intel_foundation.htm
If the grants don't work out, we might also just try to
raise $5k each from 20 ISPs and antispam companies.
cheers
meng
-------
Sender Policy Framework: http://spf.pobox.com/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
Send us money! http://spf.pobox.com/donations.html
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net