[Board] Project sponsoring

[Even Rouault]

Hi board,

I just received an email from a company, as a long time user of GDAL, that 
would have been interested in sponsoring it. They found 
http://gdal.org/sponsorship.html, that is a remain of the time were there was 
a sponsorhip program through OSGeo (I should probably remove the page 
completely). As far as I understand, due to the 501(c)(4) status, this is no 
longer possible.

So currently they have no direct way of sponsoring GDAL specific activities, 
except sponsoring developers directly. Sponsoring OSGeo is of course a way of 
indirectly sponsoring OSGeo projects, for example to fund the shared IT 
infrastructure, or code sprints, but this has a more limited impact on day-to-
day maintenance activities led by a project: bug triage & fixing, reviewing & 
applying contributions, monitoring and maintenance of coutinuous integration 
environments, user assistance on mailing list, release process, ...

I'm not sure if there's a way forward for this. QGIS has for example 
established their qgis.org association for activities that are close to the 
past OSGeo project sponsorship. I see there's a GvSIG association too. Perhaps  
other projects with similar needs have adopted similar solutions.

I'm not particularly requesting any action from the board. This was just to 
share this experience and see if the board has some thoughts about the topic 
in general. For example, if the solution of project-specific associations is 
something that the board is happy with or would encourage, or if it is 
indifferent to funding solutions the projects may adopt. Direct funding of 
developers is also a solution, although for most activities I mentioned above, 
it can be difficult to get, contrary to funding that is feature oriented. And 
even if you get it, formally, it's funding of developer/company X, and not of 
project Y.

By the way, I see the GDAL page points to 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Project_Sponsorship : I guess this one is no longer 
valid ?

Cheers,

Even


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