[gdal-dev] Sustainable GDAL initiative and fundraising

[Even Rouault]

All,

I wanted to inform you about an initiative that the PSC recently 
started, and which is now sufficiently advanced to share and develop 
further publicly along with the larger GDAL community. As you all know, 
GDAL is a foundational piece of the open-source and proprietary 
geospatial software ecosystem. While the project has successfully 
attracted contributions for adding new features and capabilities, it 
lacked financial capacity and a vehicle to support difficult-to-fund 
maintenance and infrastructure.

The PSC recently applied to be fiscally hosted by NumFOCUS 
(https://numfocus.org) to receive donations to provide that vehicle (*). 
I should underline that GDAL is and will continue to remain a OSGeo 
project for all other concerns.

We approached a first round of potential sponsors and received 
substantial multi-year pledges, which make us confident that our minimum 
target, of being able to fund the equivalent of a full-time senior 
engineer for three years, will eventually be reached. These resources 
will help fund *several* co-maintainers, enable increasing the bus 
factor of the project, and address the many tasks (ticket triaging and 
addressing, CI maintenance, pull request reviews, release management, 
etc.) needed to make it even better.

The sponsorship funding will be entirely used for activities that 
benefit the project and its associated dependencies such as PROJ, 
libgeotiff, and libtiff. The PSC will be developing procedures and 
details of how the sponsorship resources will be allocated, and we will 
update the GDAL website with them as they are finalized.

Finally, we would like to thank our initial sponsors, who have provided 
the project with generous three-year pledges of support:
- Platinium (50k USD/yr): Microsoft and Planet
- Gold (25k USD/yr): Esri, Google, Safe Software
- Silver (10k USD/yr): Koordinates, Sparkgeo, Mapgears

On behalf of the PSC,

Even

(*) NumFocus being a 501(c)3 organization, donations from US companies 
and persons are tax deductible.

-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.

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