[gdal-dev] 2026 GDAL Sponsorship Program Funding Appeal

[Howard Butler]

Hello,

It is the time of the year when the GDAL Sponsorship Program (GSP) sends renewal invoices and attempts to attract new contributors to financially support the project. This year, I am writing with an update on what GSP made possible for the project over the year. Sponsorship pools resources for work that no single organization could easily fund alone, and it supports the project-wide work that keeps GDAL fast, reliable, reviewable, secure, and ready for contributors. Releases, code review, bug triage, infrastructure maintenance, and long-term modernization are things GSP supports that every GDAL user benefits from.

Since its founding, the GSP has been a key driver of operational activity in the project. From September 1, 2025 through August 31, 2026, GDAL shipped two major releases: 3.12.0 "Chicoutimi" and 3.13.0 "Iowa City", along with nine bug fix releases on nearly a two month cadence. GDAL 3.12 built on the new `gdal` command line interface and added mixed raster/vector pipelines, nested pipelines, a `tee` step, and dynamically generated Python `gdal.alg` bindings. Other work included raster band algebra, VRT pixel-function improvements, release automation, Docker attestation, and security fixes. GDAL 3.13 continued that thread with new vector commands, dataset checks, COG and GeoPackage validation, support for external commands in pipelines, Zarr V3 improvements, COG random-write creation, new E57 and CPHD drivers, S102/S104/S111 write support, NITF CADRG writing, and INTERLIS 2.4 support. Even Rouault has reported more than 590 PRs, tickets, release tasks, reviews, and maintenance items as part of his activity within the GSP for the past year. He has been responsible for all release work, repeated PROJ EPSG update handling, libtiff and other dependency security remediation, command-line interface improvements, Zarr, GeoParquet, VRT and raster-expressions, VSI maintenance, driver review, and drafting the GDAL AI/LLM policy. 

Thank you to the organizations who have publicly supported the project https://gdal.org/en/latest/sponsors/index.html . Without these resources, the project would be struggling to keep up. Unfortunately the funding base for the GSP program has been eroding in the past year+, and two gold sponsors who stopped supporting the project represent $100k of lost support. This matters because the GSP has become the way GDAL pays for work that otherwise waits too long. The new command-line interface did not appear in one release. The same is true for security hardening, dependency updates, Python usability, documentation, cloud storage support, and release infrastructure. These threads have run across the whole life of the program, and they need renewed financial support through the GDAL Sponsorship Program to continue their pace and precision.

If GDAL is part of your organization's platform, product, data pipeline, research workflow, or customer deliverable, know the GSP is the most direct way to help keep that foundation healthy besides directly contributing time and development resources. If your organization is currently a sponsor, thank you, and I hope you can renew again this year. If it isn't, please reach out if there is anything we can do to help you make the case to your organization's leadership. Renewing or joining as a sponsor helps GDAL keep shipping reliable releases, reviewing contributions, maintaining critical infrastructure, and addressing the maintenance work that future feature development depends on. 

Thanks,

Howard