Can one sponsor sustain a FOSS project on the long term?

“These days I am receiving quite a number of mails that ask the
same question: If a FOSS project is sponsored by only one company
or entity, do you think it’s a healthy project? I

“n order to answer this question, we need to define some terms
first. Let’s start by the term “sponsor”. By sponsor we mean an
entity (company, NGO, Government) that provides certain types of
resources. We can think of resources as roughly falling into three
categories: infrastructure (website, tools, etc.), contributors
(developers, engineers) and funding. Of course by providing
infrastructure and contributors, the sponsor provides funding
indirectly as well. But if we break the notion of sponsoring into
these three different kinds of resources investment and sharing, we
can already see that the answer is not as straightforward as it may
have seem at first sight.

“Let’s ask now the same question with each time one of these
three categories of resources.”

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