Several companies sponsored or supported Core Team members during the development of TYPO3 4.5.
Open Source projects are all about voluntary code contributions. However it's not always possible to develop everything in one's free time. Jobs, family and the simple need to gain some money mean that one cannot always contribute as much as one would want without some support. Although TYPO3 is not linked to a specific company - unlike some other Open Source projects - it still wouldn't have come so far without some active supporters and sponsors. This was certainly true already in the past, but this article focuses on TYPO3 4.5.
The first source of sponsoring is - of course - the TYPO3 Association membership fees. Part of the T3A budget is allocated to the development of TYPO3 v4.x. Oliver Hader and Steffen Kamper - in particular - were supported this way during the development of TYPO3 4.5. On top of this several companies - acting mostly as employers - and one "end-user" can be mentioned:
- <link http: www.cron-it.de home _blank>cron IT GmbH sponsored nearly all the time that Ernesto Baschny spent on development and release management
- part of the time Helmut Hummel spent on the form protection framework was sponsored by his employer, <link http: www.naw.info _blank>naw.info
- Dmitry Dulepov was sponsored by <link http: www.snowflake.ch _blank>Snowflake Productions GmbH for work on the Core, in particular indexed_search (on top of work done on many extensions)
- <link http: www.aoemedia.com _blank>AOEmedia hosted the first workspaces meeting and gave a lot of freedom to Tolleiv Nietsch to work on that topic
- Oliver Hader was sponsored by the <link http: www.ville-geneve.ch _blank>City of Geneva (an end-user) to implement versioning support within IRRE (at least for 1:n relations)
- I was also sponsored by the City of Geneva (through my employer <link http: www.cobweb.ch _blank>Cobweb Development Sàrl) to intensively beta-test version 4.5, which led to quite some bug fixes.
Some non-Core Team members also contributed significantly to the success of TYPO3 4.5, and were supported too.
- <link http: www.cabag.ch _blank>cab AG gave a lot of time to Sonja Scholz for her work on improving workspaces.
I'm sure there are a lot of unknown sponsors and supporters out there. Make yourself known by using the comments to this article. It could lead to an amended version, another article or some other form of communication. It's the first time we try to list sponsors this way, so there's certainly room for improvement. However we feel it's very important to do this, to encourage sponsors to continue their support of developers work (be it Core Team members or not).