[Board] Supporting OSGeo4W

[Paolo Cavallini]

Dear OSGEO Board

We are writing to petition your help both financially and for general
support with the OSGEO4W project. Over the years, OSGEO4W (started by
Frank Warmerdam and Jürgen Fischer) has become the de-facto delivery
mechanism to Windows users for many of the projects that make up OSGEO -
including GDAL, PROJ, GRASS, QGIS and many more.

Currently, most of the maintenance and improvements to OSGEO4W are
carried out through activities of the QGIS packaging process (our
windows standalone packages are based on OSGEO4W). This includes using a
portion of the income donated to QGIS.org each year to support the
OSGEO4W project.

Since OSGEO4W plays such a central role in the OSGEO landscape we would
like to ask you to 'adopt' the OSGEO4W project financially and also help
with marshalling more contributors to the project so that it is not a
'one man show' - which represents a vulnerability to the long term
prospects of this project. You can see these sentiments reflected in the
budget request for supporting OSGEO4W in the OSGEO budget call. This
budget request represents 50% of the anticipated budget for funded
OSGEO4W work for 2020, with the remainder being funded by QGIS.org for
the interim.

Regards

The QGIS team.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/