To accept sponsorships or not?

[victorb]

I'm a bit at crossroads regarding the idea of accepting sponsorships.

Let's say we're looking for a CDN to increase the response times for open-registry. This would obviously be good for the users as latency would be decreased in most cases.

However, I'm afraid we would lose a bit of independence if we accept sponsorship deals for things like this (same with hosting). With a sponsorship, we would need to agree to some licensing terms (would be needed anyways, but probably different terms compared to sponsorship terms) and also putting their logo + link to a website somewhere. If there is extra demands, we would have to accept them in order to continue to using the service, or worse, figure out a way to pay it ourselves, or worst, have to figure out how to move away from that service.

It also decreases the idea that Open-Registry is community funded. With sponsorships, Open-Registry would be community + company funded, which doesn't sound too great.

On the other hand, sponsorships would dramatically reduce our costs. Currently, the services we pay for is server and DNS hosting. Without both of these expenses, Open-Registry would basically be free to run (currently).

I'm currently leaning towards not agreeing to any sponsorships to happen to remain fully community funded and independent but love to hear any thoughts about allowing sponsorships.

[jgamble]

There are other sites that seem to maintain their independence despite taking contributions in either hosting, work-hours, or actual money.

I think that as long as you set down what the limitations are now, before any offers are made (such as, "you get a thank-you with your logo and link, and nothing more"), and are willing to walk away from anyone who tries to get more than that, you should be fine.