(This is a guest post by Tony França)

Hi all, my name is Tony, I’m the creator of (FreedomSponsors) and today I want to talk how Jenkins has inspired me to build it.

Before starting, I’d like to thank the Jenkins crew for letting me publish this guest post in their blog. On top of that, thank you for maintaining Jenkins as well - I’m a big fan and a heavy user. Jenkins potential to make peoples lives easier is really amazing. You guys are amazing. And Kohsuke, you’re my personal hero :-)

All right, that being said, let’s move on with the story.

Most people who like FreedomSponsors probably don’t know that Jenkins is sort of the reason it exists in the first place. That’s right, if it wasn’t for Jenkins I’d probably never had the idea for FS.

This is how it happened.

I was playing with the (Jenkins OpenID plugin), and I was having some trouble with it. After a little research, I found that there was a JIRA bug for it - (JENKINS-9216: Make OpenID work with Google Apps accounts).

"Bummer" - I thought - "Maybe I can try to debug it. Oh boy, but I don’t know anything about Jenkins code. That would be too…​ expensive! I bet there are a few people out there that would be willing to even pay a few bucks to the Jenkins crew to prioritize this."

The moment I thought that, a storm of ideas came rushing into my head. It was like a conversation with myself in my mind.

And I kept thinking, and it didn’t took very long until I had the whole "sponsoring model" in my head. I realised that that was one of the best ideas I had in my life. I was very excited and I had to act on it.

I started studying Django on that same day. I had already learned some Python before and Django had been on my queue for some time. And I’m glad I did it. I’ve been building JavaEE (Java web) applications for about 8 years now, and, oh boy, Django makes things soooo much easier, and simpler, and faster to code - I’m in love with it…​ Okay, but I’m missing the point here.

So, I started building "it" alone on my free time. It took me a few days to pick a name for "it". The "FreedomSponsors" name came very naturally - it rightfully conveys what the platform would do, and the spirit of software freedom that I’d like to encourage.

Seven weeks later it was done. I had already bought the domain and created an account at Amazon AWS. So I put it up and started bugging everyone about it. And guess who was the first person I wanted to tell? Kohsuke Kawaguchi :-) It was just fair. So I sent him this email.

And his reply just made my day

You see, FS’s code was still closed when I launched it. I was worried about competition indeed. But his arguments were very convincing. Specially when he talked about sending the right message to the Free Software community. I thought about it for while and came to the conclusion that he has absolutely right. It still took me a few weeks until I moved the code to Github. I’m glad I did it. The feedback loop has been great.

And that was not his only contribution. He also gave us this very useful piece of feeback: (JIRA plugin to link from tickets to FreedomSponsors)

Indeed, that was a great idea. My friend and associate Arthur is the one who built it. Kohsuke suggested that I joined the Jenkins crew at the (Jenkins Governance meeting) to see if everyone would agree about installing it on Jenkins JIRA. Everyone liked the idea and had no ojections.

I can’t say enough how trilled and honored I felt knowing that Jenkins would be the first project to install our plugin. Thank you folks. Thanks Kohsuke. You guys are awesome :-)

Now FreedomSponsors is growing, slowly but steadily. And what makes us really happy is that almost every developer we tell about it just loves the idea. We’ve received valuable, constructive feedback from a lot of people who want to see us moving forward. That’s the best incentive that I could wish for.

We still have a lot of challenges ahead of us. The biggest and closest one in the horizon is to start a "movement" that will help spread within companies a culture of contributing more to the free software projects they depend on, by making they realise that that’s what’s best for everyone. If we can achieve that then we’ll have made the free software world even better.

So, everything I wrote so far is, hopefully, only the begginning of this story. And I’m really excited and looking forward to see it unfold. Being a part of it is even more exciting.

What about you? If you want to be updated about, or even help write the next chapters, then join, follow, like, read, spread the word, give feedback and contribute with code or new issues.

Thank you Jenkins crew, thank you Kohsuke. We wouldn’t have made it here without you.