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

[Alex Leith]

I'm with John on this one, I'd like to kick some funds in too.

I wonder if a broader sponsorship drive, where OSGeo Oceania can 'sell' a
kind of corporate support to orgs in Australia and pool funds is a good
idea?

Let's keep this simple though. From a finance perspective, I can set up
something in Tito, perhaps, where we can sell a 'pay what you want' and
OSGeo Oceania could match, and we kick over a chunk of change to support
GDAl development :-)

Cheers,

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 18:46, John Bryant <johnwbryant at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Oceania-Board at lists.osgeo.org
>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/oceania-board
>>
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>


-- 
Alex Leith
m: 0419189050
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