[Board] Binaries Packaging - A Strategic Investment

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Tim Schaub <tschaub at opengeo.org> wrote:
> How would you prioritize having the foundation spend money on
> packaging/distributing software compared to developing software?

Tim,

I personally would prioritize packaging (for high impact platforms)
higher than core development as a way of spending foundation
money.  There are a few reasons for this.

1) I think that core development is already working quite well.

2) The amount of high impact new code that would get developed
on a per-dollar-invested basis seems like it would be a drop in the
bucket - so hard to make a big difference.

3) It would be very hard to decide where to start spending money.
Which project, which feature, etc.

On the other hand, with packaging I feel a reasonable amount of money
could actually result in many projects being more accessible to a wide
variety of users.  We don't have to "pick a project" though of course
some might get left out depending on the applicability. And I also feel
that the packaging efforts have lots of low-hanging-fruit in order to
bring them to a point where they are more useful.

> I'd much rather see the foundation spend money supporting development,
> but I understand the other perspective.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how the foundation
would go about funding development.

I will note I have - in the past - considered *project sponsorship* as
a reasonable vehicle for funding development.  On the GDAL project
we try to focus project sponsorship spending on maintenance tasks
rather than brand new development, but still fixing bugs, etc.

> I'd be curious to hear how
> foundation sponsors imagine their money being best put to use.  I
> imagine project sponsors might have a different set of priorities.

It would indeed be interesting to get input from sponsors, but
foundation level sponsorship has generally been "sold" in terms
of supporting community development and operation.  So back
end service support (SAC), community events (FOSS4G, etc),
promotion (marketing).

I like to think of packaging as an adjunct to marketing. We are
trying to make it as easy as possible for people to use and
deploy the software.  For sponsors who would use the packaged
versions I feel like this could be a great value-add.

I have taken the liberty of trimming the cc:es.  It is hard to have an
ongoing discussion across many mailing lists.  I had initially included
broad distribution to poke a variety of people.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer