Overview
An open source project offers many advantages, including free
licensing, open code base, community driven developments, fast paced
releases, but it does require appropriate investment and management. Sponsorship ensures the health and sustainability, encourages growth and
makes the project ready for commercial deployment.
UniMRCP has already been recognized as a viable solution. However, there are many
aspects of the project which still require a long term commitment. Crucial tasks, such as further development and maintenance,
documentation, support to users, processing of bug reports, project
infrastructure, they all come with a cost and require more investments.
Effective Open Source Sponsorship
Generally,
a professional grade open source project incurs the same costs as a
proprietary one. Effective open source sponsorship assumes support from
multiple sponsors, whereby overall project budget is distributed among the
sponsors. Sponsors use and support the same open source project, but build
and offer their proprietary solutions based on it.
Risk Management
Evaluating
the feature set, stability and overall quality of an open source project is usually straightforward, as the publicly available source and
facility tools allow developers to easily test, modify and use the code. Meanwhile, assessing the overall risk of using an open source
project is not always a trivial task. The riskiest aspect of such an undertaking is often the level of support. UniMRCP
sponsorship allows the reduction of the risk level and guarantees a certain commitment of the project author(s) to fulfilling the sponsors' requests. Commercial support can be considered as an alternate option to reduce the risk level.
Sponsorship Process
Sponsorship lasts one year, afterwards it may be renewed or allowed to expire. There are several levels of sponsorship.
For further inquires and details please contact the creator and author of the UniMRCP project.
Arsen Chaloyan
arsen.chaloyan@unimrcp.org
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