This is a free and open-source learning, research, and engineering project. Funding must not turn access to the software, core documentation, or reference implementations into a paid product.
Sponsorship is welcome when it helps make sustainable work possible. Its intended purpose is modest and practical: reasonable compensation for contributor time, development/test hardware, infrastructure, documentation, testing, security review, research, student/community work, and unavoidable project expenses.
The core reference implementation must remain fully usable without proprietary software, paid APIs, subscriptions or commercial licences. Paid specialist tools may be used during development or validation, but must never become mandatory runtime dependencies.
Funding does not entitle recipients to exclusive core features, ownership of community work, authority to weaken privacy/security requirements, hidden product placement, or control over technical decisions, merely because money was provided. Sponsors may fund work and participate in open technical discussion; architectural decisions remain subject to normal project review.
Where practical, material sponsorship should identify its purpose, such as infrastructure, hardware, contributor time, security review, documentation, or a defined research topic. The intention is cost and effort support, not profit maximization.
This project is developed as free and open-source software for learning, research and practical enterprise use. Contributions of code, documentation, testing and review are as valuable as financial support.
Sponsorship is optional. When organizations or individuals choose to support the project financially, funds are intended primarily to cover project expenses and give contributors protected time for maintenance, research, documentation, testing, and implementation.
Sponsorship does not purchase exclusive features or control over the project. The reference implementation remains free, self-hostable, and accessible to students, researchers, individual developers, and organizations.
If the project's work is useful to you or your organization and you would like to help sustain it, modest sponsorship is welcome. Just as importantly, we welcome technical collaboration, review, teaching use, research cooperation, and contributions upstream to the open-source projects on which this middleware builds.
The project prefers integration and upstream collaboration over rebuilding mature open-source infrastructure. Sponsored work may therefore include contributions to dependencies or joint work with their communities.