I couldn't find it in our docs. If a corporation wants to sponsor Pants monetarily how can it do so? Is there a page listing sponsorship, etc...?

cc @busy-vase-39202

One way is to contract with Toolchain for support and/or professional services (for work on specific features that corporation wants to prioritize). Then the corporation supports Pants and gets a commercial service in return. There has in the past also been direct sponsorship of Pants Build (which is a separate legal entity) to help pay for CI/AWS/Cloudflare/Readme etc. Those expenses are tiny these days, since we switched to GHA from TravisCI, so that form of sponsorship has become less necessary.

(switching to my maintainer hat) I'd love if the Pantsbuild org could contract a tech writer for a few cycles to go ham on documentation 🤩 that, of course, costs money

I got a quote on that a while back, from a contract tech writer. It was 5 figures for even a very brief very focused project. And yeah, I'd love to see that happen too. Any possibility that Big Blue would like to sponsor that or bigger work? What I'd most love to find right now is a sponsor for adding JS and/or Rust support. We know that those are the next languages that folks are clamoring for.

It's possible, but I imagine there'd be some kind of (for lack of a better word) "reward". Like a "sponsors" page with tiers or something equivalently "advertising"-y? I'm still navigating capital "C" Corporate, but putting on my Corporate hat I would guess there's some expectation of "recognition" for sponsorship.

That is certainly fair, and I'm confident the maintainers would be happy to agree on a status and publicity plan that makes an amount of fuss commensurate with the size of the contribution.

IBM also has a ton of technical writers - I wonder if they ever do donations of services, vs. monetary?

In large orgs it's common for the docs maintainers to be part of the devrel org. If that's the case at IBM, you may be in a really good position to ask for an in-kind donation such as Eric suggests. It's also common for devrels at companies of that size to have a discretionary fund they can tap to make modest gifts to community. So I highly recommend checking in with the devrel folks who are assigned to your product line. They may be able to open doors internally much easier than you can alone.

Yeah I can't imagine we'd get pushback on sponsorship publicity