CodePlex.com donates $25,000 to Mercurial project

Meh. It puts them in the highest-tier position (http://mercurial.selenic.com/sponsors/) like GOOG and Fog Creek. The same arguments can be presented there.

It's nice to have companies donate money to worthy causes, but from my experience with seeing how hard it can be to attract conference sponsorship, I imagine that this level of contribution is the smallest a reasonably large company can give without the budgeting being a hassle.

For a conference, you'd think that setting sponsorship levels at $10000 and lower would attract lots of sponsors because such money is peanuts to a large corporation, and they get a reasonable amount of good, focused publicity, but it's rather likely that someone in such a corporation whose job it is to throw money around for promotional initiatives or "community encouragement" sees small donations as making more work for them: they'd rather throw down a larger amount and use up their budget more quickly doing less work. And I know of one large company who sponsored a conference and never got round to pay the invoice in the end: that says a lot about the corporate mindset, I think, and the organisers of that conference have shown considerable restraint in not naming and shaming the company in question.

So, it's nice to see a contribution that someone in Microsoft thought was worth their while making, but the observation about maximising goodwill is completely valid, too. They, Google and Fog Creek are all doing good business around Mercurial.