I mostly wanted to say that I'm here listening to the discussion and thinking about all these issues.
On the technical side, I tried to publicly think about long term maintainability / reliability of GDAL over the years. It's always a moving target, but here are a few of my old thoughts: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2016-May/044298.html https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2015-September/042680.html Those leave out a lot and are dated. On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 12:24 PM David Strip <[email protected]> wrote: > Kudos to Howard for his succinct summary of the situation and the call to > action. While I have nowhere near his experience with open source, my > experience with other volunteer organizations reveals a similar pattern. > One person, or maybe a small number of people, carry the burden of keeping > the organization running. This goes on for years until someone burns out. > Sometimes new people step before chaos sets in, but too often the > organization begins a death spiral. > > Open source broadly is facing something of a turning point as commercial > organizations have learned how to profit from open source, but have not yet > learned they have to contribute to the commons. A particularly relevant > example is the case of MongoDB where cloud services were offering paid > hosting while paying nothing to support the project. Gdal's situation > strikes me as similar. Large commercial vendors are embedding gdal in their > offerings, either directly in software delivered to users or as part of the > infrastructure behind the services they provide. Some of these companies > are very profitable and could well afford to pay their way. Unfortunately, > it is often the case that the developer who is aware of this reliance on > gdal may not be in a position to convince his/her management to ante up for > the "free" software. > > What is the path forward? One path Howard suggests is establishing a > foundation similar to that behind Qgis. Another alternative, probably far > more controversial, is a license change. MongoDB created a license class > directed at the cloud suppliers who were (morally) abusing the free license > terms. gdal could adopt a license that requires those bundling gdal into a > commercial product or service to pay their way. As I said, this would no > doubt be quite controversial. Then there's the case of "second-order" > free-riders. Gdal is critical technology underlying Qgis, another free, > open-source project. Should firms that contribute to the qgis foundation > also contribute to gdal, or can they rely on the appropriate portion of > their "dues" to be forwarded to gdal? > > > _______________________________________________ > gdal-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev >
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