Open source software works because people acting in their own self
interest have the auxiliary benefit of helping everyone in the
project. Report your pet bug, file a patch, add a new feature -- all
of these things immediately help you, but ultimately help the
project. This activity also imparts tangential benefits that are
very hard to quantify but can be clearly important like personal
visibility, credibility, and status.
For an open source software project to be viable as a development
entity, it must be able to bestow these benefits to its individual
contributors. Everyone's reasons may be different, but people must
be able to receive a return on their sweat equity that they put in or
volunteer effort will not continue to flow into a project. I think
that recognition and facilitation of this symbiosis is a blind spot
for OSGeo. We should be striving to ensure that it can take place
because we are a volunteer organization whose members have common goals.
Wait a second? Isn't OSGeo an Autodesk thing with lots of money?
How is it a "volunteer organization?"
Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer
efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones. The OSGeo Journal
effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's
efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the
lights on for developer tools like Subversion/Trac have been
volunteer enterprises (please help flesh out this list, these are
only those I am most aware of, I know there have been many others).
However, I think financial resources, both in the capacity to
generate sponsorship money and the ability to spend it wisely, are
what provides the opportunity to set OSGeo apart and provide the
volunteerism leverage.
When Autodesk came in and helped bootstrap OSGeo, it was fairly clear
that our financial existence would not be an indefinite expenditure
-- we would have to exist on our own. Additionally, to meet 503c3
requirements, we cannot have a situation where we have a majority
benefactor as we do now. We're almost two years down the road into
bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very
little. As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship
dollars beyond Autodesk are the "targeted development" vehicles like
those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL.
Another aspect is the sweat equity that has been poured into OSGeo
over the past year and a half. Committee members, board members, and
of course, especially Frank Warmerdam have been spending a lot of
time bootstrapping. The opportunity cost of this effort has not been
insignificant. I think it is time we take a step back and attempt to
quantify what the return on that investment has been. What has the
existence of OSGeo enabled that could not have happened otherwise?
With some new blood and hopefully new enthusiasm coming to the OSGeo
board, I would like to propose that we challenge the assumptions of
the value proposition of OSGeo in an attempt to focus our efforts.
Other than some minor benefits (or major pains, hah!) of shared
infrastructure (Subversion/Trac) and the arguably beneficial
bureaucratic incubation process, what value does OSGeo provide for
member projects? What is the elevator pitch, one-sentence value
proposition to a potential sponsor of OSGeo? What is the concrete
return on sweat equity that a volunteer within OSGeo can expect to
earn? We need to think about structural issues OSGeo might have that
hinder our ability to model the Open Source symbiosis described in
the first paragraphs of this email for those with financial resources
or those willing to swing an ax or two.
Howard
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