[mapguide-internals] Donate to Builds

[Jason Birch]

Hi all,

The MapGuide project is working towards a public build and release system.  Putting this in place will provide a number of benefits, including but not limited to:

- Getting fixes into the hands of our community as quickly as possible
- Higher quality code through allowing anyone to easily test new features and bug fixes
- Solid platform to start testing against more Linux flavours
- Stronger integration of unit tests with immediate feedback when something breaks
- Increased transparency, making the project more attractive to new developers

Trevor Wekel through his private company (OTX Systems) has donated a bunch of hardware and software to help start this process, and community members UV, Martin, and Trevor are working configuration and development of the build system.

We can only get so far with these donations though.  Going forward, we need to be able to cover ongoing software license costs, hardware upgrades, and other critical items.  If you are benefitting from MapGuide Open Source, I strongly encourage you to consider donating to our build system using the PayPal link on the MapGuide Downloads page:

http://mapguide.osgeo.org/download

Details on this initiative are available in RFC 58 and, of course, we'll be happy to anwser any questions on this mailing list.

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/MapGuideRfc58

Jason