[OSGeo-Fundraising] Autodesk sponsorship page

[Arnulf Christl]

Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> As part of Autodesk's sponsorship benefits they get a full page company 
> profile.  I've worked with them to get the text pulled together and 
> posted it to:
> http://www.osgeo.org/sponsors/autodesk
> 
> Does this look okay to you?  I'm happy with it.  Once we are agreed I'll 
> change the link from their logo on http://www.osgeo.org/sponsors/ to 
> point to this new page.
> 
> Sound good?
> 
> Tyler

Hi,
yes this is fine except for one thing which I already identified as problematic before. 

"In 2005, Autodesk became the first commercial software vendor to contribute to the geospatial open source community, opening the source code to its MapGuide Open Source and feature data objects (FDO) technologies."

This is simply not true. There are many examples of commercial enterprises either contributing to Open Source, or releasing their own proprietary software as Free Software before 2005. You could say: Autodesk is the first of the few GIS big ones (Intergraph, ESRI, SmallWorld, etc) to get the gist - but even that would feel skewed as Autodesk is not that big regarding GIS at all.

It is not that I disrespect the decision made by Autodesk or want to belittle their boldness but it just tastes wrong to say that they are the first around. And as people are still eying Autodesk closely I suggest that it would be wise to be careful what to say and maybe even be a little humble. It would just suit them so much better. Autodesk has so many ways to market and show off in their standard stance that I had hoped they would do something more interesting on this page. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf.