sponsor relation points / non-project-directed funding

[Jo Walsh]

dear fundraisers,

I was talking to a friend of mine who is now with Google UK about the
OSGeo geodata repository project and the ad-hoc research work on
simplified metadata/discovery that it has wound up encouraging. 
He suggested that I apply to Google for sponsorship of some library
development and packaging work, that they'd be receptive to this stuff.

Now before I start working on a one-page proposal / running this by
participants, I wanted to sanitycheck here about who else is talking to
Google about what and whether this idea makes anyone go 'eek!' 

Potential conflicts of interest?

- are Google likely potential candidates for gold sponsorship? 
  I would definitely want to pitch this as "an OSGeo application" but
  don't want to muddy the waters with others maybe talking to them.
- Google funded Geoserver (and by extension GeoTools?) to implement a
  KML connector recently. Part of the repository work involves wanting
  to improve more OWS client libraries in different languages -
  specifically I would want to support improvements to SeanG's OWSLib 
  as it's about the closest to GeoTools in python and we've been using it a lot. 
cheers,


jo