Foundation:Cash Sponsors Policy

Introduction
After being approached by a few large Gentoo users who wanted to purchase advertising on the gentoo.org side bar, the trustees put a motion to the Foundation members. The motion was "Should major Gentoo users be permitted to purchase ads on the sidebar". It was carried by a large majority of members who voted. There is thus a mandate for the break with tradition that only infrastructure donations qualify for gentoo.org side bar space. This policy document is intended to ensure that the intent of the mandate is implemented consistently across all applicants.

The Policy
''' How will the Trustees Determine That an Applicant actually uses Gentoo? '''

Applicants will be required to submit a document in two parts:
 * Briefly describing how many installs they have and what they are used for.
 * Describing how the above installs are maintained.

The text describing how many installs and their uses may be published on gentoo.org. The exact wording of any material to be made public will be agreed with applicants on a case by case basis as a part of the acceptance process of any advertising.

The approach to maintenance will be kept private to the trustees. There are no right and wrong answers.

What's the Fee?
The fee will be calculated based on its relationship to the value of the more usual data centre sponsors donations, had the Gentoo Foundation Inc needed to purchase these data centre services.

Fractional Fees
Its possible that ads will not be shown every hit - thus space can be shared by a number of ads and the fee reduced in proportion. In this case, a simple random weighted subset of available ads will be shown.

What's the format of the ads?
Ad details:


 * 1) Maximum 50 characters of mouseover text
 * 2) Translations of mouseover text are NOT supported
 * 3) Image dimensions
 * 4) Height: min 50px, max 125 pixels
 * 5) Width: 125 pixels (exactly)
 * 6) File formats: PNG
 * 7) Max Filesize: 25KiB
 * 8) No animations are permitted

Infrastructure note 2015/11/27:

The details of the ad have changed with the website design. The previous design of the website placed the ads on the sidebar. The website design places them on the lower region of the front page. Additionally, the image format is now limited to PNG for performance, and translations are no longer supported (translated ads were used by only two sponsors).