"Sponsored by"

[bileslav]

I noticed this on Colin Percival's commits for 14.2-RELEASE:

Sponsored by: Amazon

When I saw such things before, I thought it meant that the particular change was sponsored by said organization. However, it seems obvious to me that FreeBSD releases themselves are not sponsored by anyone (will we no longer have releases if Amazon stops sponsoring?).

How should such commit lines be understood, then?

 

[Kai Burghardt]

Compare PR 228353 → I guess it could mean Colin was on the clock so there’s some kind of “implicit sponsorship”, but I don’t know everybody’s, every committer’s employers. Look, you get paid to do your job and preparing FreeBSD releases is usually not one of your primary obligations.​

 

[Crivens]

preparing FreeBSD releases is usually not one of your primary obligations.

Maybe not, but if your boss informs you that the cloud team is waiting for it, you might consider that a work package assignment. But I also don't know anything.

 

[tingo]

It has been mentioned before that sometimes sponsors (organizations) sponsors developers to work on improvements to existing code; it could be that. But I'm guessing.