[gdal-dev] GEOS Maintenance Grant

[Howard Butler]

GDAL PSC,

When we wrote the GDAL RFCs on sponsorship, we provided an escape clause to allow us to direct resources to other projects upon which GDAL depends. Our sponsorship numbers are still increasing, which provides us an opportunity to directly support some of those projects, and one of them is obviously GEOS. GEOS provides all of the geometry algebra support for GDAL/OGR and many other open source geospatial softwares including Shapely, PostGIS, GeoPandas, MapServer, and more. 

Dan Baston of the GEOS PSC has been identified as the developer with capacity and interest in the next year to take on GEOS development on APIs and performance, which he has a long history of doing for the project. This support should allow him to work longer, multi-release upgrades that will provide strong performance and convenience benefits for the project.

I motion to provide the GEOS PSC with a $50,000 USD grant to address performance, API, and other work that does not attract directed funding in GEOS. The GEOS PSC will be responsible for coordinating work tasks, rates, and development timelines. Howard Butler or Even Rouault of the GDAL NumFocus liaison team will coordinate dispersement as directed by the GEOS PSC and NumFocus rules.

Thank you again to the GDAL Sponsors https://gdal.org/sponsors/index.html who have made this kind of grant possible. A better GEOS makes for a better GDAL.

Howard