[OSGeo Oceania] [Oceania-Board] Sponsoring GDAL maintainer

[John Bryant]

Great initiative, thanks Dionne!

I'm totally in support of anything we can do in this region to help make
open source more sustainable. If OSGeo Oceania sets up a matching fund and
helps identify productive ways to spend it (not just on GDAL, but perhaps
on an array of important projects), I would like to contribute. I hope any
business or org in the region that benefits from using open source would
consider contributing.

The QGIS SIG was initiated to help with the procurement problem you
mention, where many organisations can't make a "donation" but can justify
spending on a "membership". We haven't kicked this off yet, but will soon.
Hopefully there will be some useful lessons learned along the way.

Cheers
John

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 15:11, Dionne Hansen <dionne.hansen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello OSGeo Oceania,
> I'm addressing this to the board, the OSGeo oceania members and to the
> wider community. It has come to my attention that  a message sent on the
> goal-dev mailing list here:
> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2021-January/053302.html -
> which highlights a problem with burnout among the GDAL maintainers and
> outlines the difficulties of maintaining a tool like GDAL when one is only
> paid for developing new features but not for maintaining the project,
> responding to the mailing list, bug fixing, or new releases.
>
> That message further outlines ways of overcoming the problem of burning
> out the project maintainers. Including getting more people to participate
> and providing a revenue stream so that a maintainer only has to do the
> maintenance job.
>
> Even Rouault (the current maintainer of the project with over 19,838
> commits) put up a call for sponsorship (
> https://github.com/sponsors/rouault) for his activities maintaining and
> improving GDAL and PROJ. He is also a developer of QGIS, MapServer,
> libtiff, libgeotiff, and cpenjpeg.
>
> I feel that OSGeo Oceania should be doing our part to help with revenue
> streams to safeguard the maintainer against overloading and burnout.
>
> 1) As a stop gap effort I propose that we donate $500 to Even for
> maintenance purposes.
>
> 2) I think we should discuss if we can help in any other capacity - ie.
> amplify the need to donate money to projects like these, matching donated
> amounts up to a certain limit?
>
> 3) Discuss the barriers that our respective organisations have to donating
> maintenance funds to these projects. Ie. my employer could not sponsor via
> GitHub without breaking procurement rules. Is there anything that OSGeo
> Oceania can do to make maintenance sponsorship easier?
>
> I'd appreciate a discussion about what we can do to help in the near and
> long term and I will set up a loomio thread for the $500.
>
> Thanks,
> Dionne Hansen
> _______________________________________________
> Oceania-Board mailing list
> Oceania-Board at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/oceania-board
>
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