[Qgis-psc] Proposal that QGIS.ORG will become a member of the OpenDesign Alliance

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi QGIS.ORG board,

As you may be aware, Jürgen I worked on a proposal to allow import of 
CAD data into QGIS. Jürgen provided an offer.

We plan to use the Teigha library of the OpenDesign Alliance (ODA) 
(https://www.opendesign.com/the_oda_platform/Teigha). It isn't GPL 
compatible and it requires a membership fee with annual renewal.

I was investigating whether OSGEO could become a member - this is 
theoretically possible, but it would require a higher and more expensive 
membership level than as if QGIS.ORG would become a member. I would thus 
propose that QGIS.ORG becomes a sustaining member of the ODA, which 
would allow to distribute binaries of the Teigha library for all of our 
supported platforms, along with the QGIS binaries.$

Financially, the sustaining membership level would mean US $5000.- in 
the first year and US $3000.- annual renewal in the subsequent years. I 
would propose that QGIS.ORG would pay this membership fees from the 
QGIS.ORG funds - and if you agree - will include it into our 2016 
budget. See https://www.opendesign.com/Sustaining

I will propose to make this decision dependent on our ability to raise 
the 32k Euros required to pay Jürgen for the QGIS-side development. So 
far I only have confirmations for about 10k Euros. Still some work to 
raise the full amount.

Do you have any questions regarding this proposal?

Thanks,
Andreas