[OSGeo-Discuss] Return on Equity

[Howard Butler]

Open source software works because people acting in their own self  
interest have the auxiliary benefit of helping everyone in the  
project.  Report your pet bug, file a patch, add a new feature -- all  
of these things immediately help you, but ultimately help the  
project.  This activity also imparts tangential benefits that are  
very hard to quantify but can be clearly important like personal  
visibility, credibility, and status.

For an open source software project to be viable as a development  
entity, it must be able to bestow these benefits to its individual  
contributors.  Everyone's reasons may be different, but people must  
be able to receive a return on their sweat equity that they put in or  
volunteer effort will not continue to flow into a project.  I think  
that recognition and facilitation of this symbiosis is a blind spot  
for OSGeo. We should be striving to ensure that it can take place  
because we are a volunteer organization whose members have common goals.

Wait a second?  Isn't OSGeo an Autodesk thing with lots of money?   
How is it a "volunteer organization?"

Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer  
efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones.  The OSGeo Journal  
effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's  
efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the  
lights on for developer tools like Subversion/Trac have been  
volunteer enterprises (please help flesh out this list, these are  
only those I am most aware of, I know there have been many others).   
However, I think financial resources, both in the capacity to  
generate sponsorship money and the ability to spend it wisely, are  
what provides the opportunity to set OSGeo apart and provide the  
volunteerism leverage.

When Autodesk came in and helped bootstrap OSGeo, it was fairly clear  
that our financial existence would not be an indefinite expenditure  
-- we would have to exist on our own.  Additionally, to meet 503c3  
requirements, we cannot have a situation where we have a majority  
benefactor as we do now.  We're almost two years down the road into  
bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very  
little.  As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship  
dollars beyond Autodesk are the "targeted development" vehicles like  
those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL.

Another aspect is the sweat equity that has been poured into OSGeo  
over the past year and a half.  Committee members, board members, and  
of course, especially Frank Warmerdam have been spending a lot of  
time bootstrapping.  The opportunity cost of this effort has not been  
insignificant.  I think it is time we take a step back and attempt to  
quantify what the return on that investment has been.  What has the  
existence of OSGeo enabled that could not have happened otherwise?

With some new blood and hopefully new enthusiasm coming to the OSGeo  
board, I would like to propose that we challenge the assumptions of  
the value proposition of OSGeo in an attempt to focus our efforts.   
Other than some minor benefits (or major pains, hah!) of shared  
infrastructure (Subversion/Trac) and the arguably beneficial  
bureaucratic incubation process, what value does OSGeo provide for  
member projects?  What is the elevator pitch, one-sentence value  
proposition to a potential sponsor of OSGeo?  What is the concrete  
return on sweat equity that a volunteer within OSGeo can expect to  
earn?  We need to think about structural issues OSGeo might have that  
hinder our ability to model the Open Source symbiosis described in  
the first paragraphs of this email for those with financial resources  
or those willing to swing an ax or two.

Howard