[Board] Project sponsoring

[Venkatesh Raghavan]

Even,

Thanks for bringing this up. As Jody, has pointed out,
the funding GDAL through "Project Sponsorship" [1]
of OSGeo Foundation is possible. I do think that our .501(c)(4)
status does no restrict sponsorship opportunities is anyway.
As in the past, the OSGeo board will be happy to manage the
this under "Project Sponsorship" [1].

QGIS and gvSIG associations must had a good reason to manage
their sponsorship independently. One of the reasons that they
decided to do so could be because it was more convenient, I guess.

Funding developers directly is also a possibility, but in some cases
the sponsors may like to have their paperwork done through an
officially registered foundation or association.

Personally, I think that managing GDAL sponsorship would depend
on what is most convenient for the PSC and potential Project
Sponsors.

The board would be happy to assist in managing the GDAL "Project
Sposorship".

Best

Venka

[1] http://www.osgeo.org/sponsorship/opportunities

On 2016/02/21 2:15, Jody Garnett wrote:
> Project sponsorship works, we fixed the tax stuff.
>
> I best make a news announcement.
> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 5:26 AM Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> --
>> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
>> http://www.spatialys.com
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>
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