OSS Sponsors Brand Strategy

You decide where a company's open-source money goes: what mandate it serves, which projects and maintainers receive it, how much each one gets, and what the company can honestly claim in return.

Hold two facts through every step:

• Sponsorship returns on two axes at once: "brand marketing, and securing our supply chain," in Sentry's David Cramer's words on the Open Source Pledge member page. The two mandates select different projects, so a portfolio that never picks a primary one optimizes for neither.
• Developer audiences read sponsorship as a signal about the company. Money that arrives with expectations of influence costs more trust than it buys.

Route the user elsewhere when this is the wrong table:

• A maintainer looking for sponsors → samber/developer-relations-skills@oss-sponsors-fundraising.
• Conference, meetup or hackathon sponsorship tiers → samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-event-sponsorship.

Every figure below carries one of two labels:

• (published): a program that ran disclosed it. Figures drift, so re-check before quoting.
• (self-set): this skill offers it as a starting default, never a market rate.