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Kudos to Howard for his succinct summary of the situation and the
call to action. While I have nowhere near his experience with open
source, my experience with other volunteer organizations reveals a
similar pattern. One person, or maybe a small number of people,
carry the burden of keeping the organization running. This goes on
for years until someone burns out. Sometimes new people step before
chaos sets in, but too often the organization begins a death spiral.
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Open source broadly is facing something of a turning point as
commercial organizations have learned how to profit from open
source, but have not yet learned they have to contribute to the
commons. A particularly relevant example is the case of MongoDB
where cloud services were offering paid hosting while paying nothing
to support the project. Gdal's situation strikes me as similar.
Large commercial vendors are embedding gdal in their offerings,
either directly in software delivered to users or as part of the
infrastructure behind the services they provide. Some of these
companies are very profitable and could well afford to pay their
way. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the developer who is
aware of this reliance on gdal may not be in a position to convince
his/her management to ante up for the "free" software. <br>
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What is the path forward? One path Howard suggests is establishing
a foundation similar to that behind Qgis. Another alternative,
probably far more controversial, is a license change. MongoDB
created a license class directed at the cloud suppliers who were
(morally) abusing the free license terms. gdal could adopt a license
that requires those bundling gdal into a commercial product or
service to pay their way. As I said, this would no doubt be quite
controversial. Then there's the case of "second-order" free-riders.
Gdal is critical technology underlying Qgis, another free,
open-source project. Should firms that contribute to the qgis
foundation also contribute to gdal, or can they rely on the
appropriate portion of their "dues" to be forwarded to gdal?<br>
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