[mapguide-internals] Donate to Builds

[Jason Birch]

Rock Beans wrote:

> I think this is a request for Autodesk.

Autodesk is already paying the lion's share of maintenance and development of MapGuide Open Source.  They contributed their entire initial code base for MapGuide and FDO, and purchased and open-sourced CS-Map.  They continue to develop the application in ways that benefit all of us.  They also contribute heavily to OSGeo, which in turn covers the project's primary hosting, revision control, bug tracking, and mailing lists.

Members of the MapGuide Open Source community are using software that has considerable commercial value, and have access to a growing community of developers and power users that provide support at a level that is as good as or greater than that offerred for most proprietary software.  All of this without any obligation or direct payment to Autodesk.

For me, the primary benefit of open source software is moving away from the model where the customers with the most licenses determine which features are implemented or which bugs are fixed.  As long as we as a community continue to hold our hands out to Autodesk and expect them to pay for and fix everything, we will never reap the benefits that come from a truly open source development model.

I don't feel that it's unreasonable at all to request donations, especially for initiatives like this which have direct benefit to the open source community without much incremental gain for Autodesk (they already have their own internal build and install processes). 

Jason