Sponsorship policy

[fcollonval]

In a recent transfer, the project was having a sponsorship link to a personal sponsor account. What should be our policy for sponsorship links?

Personally I would prefer dropping any sponsorship link or to create one for the organization - but that will require some management.

cc @jupyterlab-contrib/members

[krassowski]

Allowing sponsorship for projects which are actively maintained by the author may be a good thing as it encourages maintenance contributions from developers who do this outside of their 9-5 job. Still, it may be good to set some rules, like only allowing "thank you" sponsorship links (rather than "pay me to fix this bug"), and ensuring that the link is described accurately as benefiting a specific maintainer, and not affiliated in any way with this organization. We could also require that if present, these are placed in a dedicated section in README with some template text to explain the situation.

As for the recent transfer case, here it is a clear case for removal as the author stated that they do not have time to maintain the project.

That said, I would be also fine with setting a policy to "no sponsorship links" in the short term until we have a consensus on how to allow them.