[mapguide-internals] Donate to Builds

[Ivan Milicevic]

I couldn't agree more. We, Supra net, as a company, already considering
a donation because we earn a lot's of money on mapguide platform.
Autodesk already gave a lot to this community just like community gave
back to them.

>From the other view, couple of thousand $ is really small amount of
money for company like Autodesk, so I can understand Rock Beans and his
view.

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jason
Birch
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 1:03 AM
To: MapGuide Internals Mail List
Subject: RE: [mapguide-internals] Donate to Builds

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_______________________________________________
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