Giving Back
Yesterday Hobu chastized successful MapServer users ZedX for apparently giving little back to the MapServer community. A soybean rust tracking web app developed by ZedX, using Linux and MapServer, recently made a splash in the All Points Blog. I think the fact that a company can put MapServer to use in a good sized contract without the need for paid consultation with core MapServer developers, or the need for feature enhancement, is a nice indicator of the maturity of the MapServer project. Touting their use of Linux and MapServer is also good for us all. Hobu knows as well as any of us how hard it can be to get an agency like the USDA to embrace open source. Hopefully ZedX will ice the cake and give their programmers a little time to share their new expertise with MapServer users through the mailing lists or IRC.
Near the end of his post, Hobu writes:
It is my hope that OSGeo will be able to provide a clearinghouse for contributions to its member projects and solves the issue of "great, I have some money/time/resources to contribute, who do I give it to?" Also, the ability to pool contributions together for larger efforts is something that is sorely needed. Those efforts are just getting off the ground though, and time will tell if that approach will be any more successful than individual-to-individual or individual-to-project contributions.
I'm in 100% disagreement with Hobu here. I don't think OSGeo is a good place for a company to invest modest amounts of money in open source projects. Look at the money being wasted now (yes, wasted) paying Collabnet for consulting on community building and open source development. Nothing against Collabnet, but the OSGeo projects already have communities and infrastructure. Direct contribution to individual projects remains the best way to make small to medium investments count.
Comments
Re: Giving Back
Author: JL
I agree with Howard to an extent but... - It did cost at least a little money for ZedX to distribute a nationwide press release and they didn't have to mention the use of Mapserver in their high-profile project with the USDA. - The Mapserver community needs to make it easy to do the right thing. The MS Plone site needs a "Donate" or "Tip Jar" button on the front to at least plant the idea for visitors of showering money all over Mapserver via PayPal or by credit card. Where should checks be sent? - OSGeo is too indirect. It is big change for the MS community but the growing number of generalized software integrators who are just looking for a web mapping solution to finish a project are unlikely to make that political connection. And even if they did the link to OSGeo is buried after the "IRC" and "Mailing List" links on the "Community" page and not under the "Home", "Download", or "Documentation" tabs where the eyes of wealthy, big-hearted, programmers are likely to locate it. Mapserver has matured to the point where a little guerilla marketing outside the open-source geospatial community is in order. Tyler Mitchell has put MS and related technologies on the mainstream tech radar and we need more of that. Most of the government agencies are very open to OS solutions. I can verify firsthand NOAA and the U.S. Navy are heavy into Plone. Linux and just about everything Apache makes are also very popular in the scientific branches of the federal government. If these agencies saw how Mapserver or PrimaGIS fit into their ESRIfied infrastructure they would adopt it quickly. A lot of people use ArcIMS but very few if any love it.Re: Giving Back
Author: Gary Sherman
Our experience has been that a "Donate" button results in few, if any donations. Either people don't see the button (not likely) or the mindset of many users of "free" software leads them to believe a project doesn't really need financial support. Perhaps they believe there is a big financial backer behind the scenes. A project with a user base in the 1000's to 10,000's should reasonably expect a little support from the community, not to mention corporate users. To date we have not experienced that. Maybe its a marketing issue...Re: Giving Back
Author: Sean
I'm not sure that a PayPal link will benefit the Python Cartographic Library or PrimaGIS projects, but then we're still at the early stage where clear and interesting use cases, detailed bug reports, and sprint hosting (best of all!) are way more valuable than cash. Sometimes it seems that the more mature and pervasive the open source software, the fewer the small monetary contributions. Rhetorical question: when was the last time you sent $20 to the GCC project, or Vim? In my case, it's never (although I do subscribe to a civic-minded ISP that does a ton for the Linux cause, for what that's worth). Maybe MapServer has made it across such a threshold.Re: Giving Back
Author: Allan
I have donated to freegis.org, freenode.net, FSF, and EFF. Not a lot, but I figure every little bit helps. If I'm willing to spend the odd $20 on Mac OS X shareware, I ought to be spending the same amounts for the open source stuff I use. So why have I not donated to Mapserver, etc.? Simple: No paypal button. It's easy enough to set up, but in the case of mapserver, the question may have been, who manages the money? With osgeo, there might be some overhead, but at least I would expect any donations to be put to good use. I think the users need to be educated. We may not want to build nagware, but an awareness campaign of some sort might not be a bad idea.Re: Giving Back
Author: Sean
Allan, I need to be convinced that OSGeo will put modest donations to good use. There's no link to a budget at osgeo.org, and the closest thing to a budget (http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Budget_2006-2007) suggests to me that an Executive Director position, the cost of sending the OSGeo gang to conferences, and conference hosting costs could, without extreme care, consume small donations. It's the room between the max and min for those items that suggets to me the potential to soak up donations. Even if there was a separate account exclusively for support of software development, how can a person be assured that their donation goes to their favorite projects? Better to cut out the middle man and donate directly (if possible) to a project. Now, if you have $100,000 and want to go big, it's another matter. OSGeo *might* be the place to invest a big chunk of money.Re: Giving Back
Author: Allan
I agree with you, Sean, that OSGeo needs a good donation explanation. Maybe even allows for targeted donations. The idea of 2/3 going to projects 1/3 going to "overhead" is being batted around. I guess it will come down to whether people value the increased visibility that OSGeo can provide for Geo open source enough to want to help pay for that visibility. That, in turn, begs the question of whether OSGeo can do a better job of overall visibility increase than individual projects can. So far, I'm convinced that the answer will be "yes". The OSGeo presence at Where 2.0 was great. There's going to be a very snazzy OSGeo booth at Intergeo in Munich in October. Both booths actually did/are not costing OSGeo.org any money, but if OSGeo did not exist, then the booths would not exist at all. "Institutional" (corporate, government, etc) people don't notice little things. They have to be hit with broadsides. Big booths at shows are broadsides. The key is to find a balance. OSGeo is a bit young to have that. Case in point, it takes time and effort to develop a budget. Should people be doing that for free? Well, maybe. But there has to be a goal. I'm in favor of an Exec. Director for OSGeo. But I'm not in favor of OSGeo becoming an organization that's driven by chasing more and more money to feed more and more overhead. That's a vicious cycle that OSGeo has to avoid.Giving Back, I'll bite: How?
Author: matt wilkie
speaking as someone employed in government, I have tried several times to solicit specific open source geo-spatial development from the developer community, via mailing lists and forum posts, and had *zero* responses until I posted on gisbid.com. And then the responses weren't from open source developers ("eh? what's gdal?"). My conclusion: geo-spatial open source developers aren't very hungry. They would like to be paid to follow their own interests, not work on someone elses problem. Given that choice, they follow their bliss, preferring a few tummy rumbles to an uninteresting task. Who can blame them? It's what I do! Until someone comes up with a novel way to mashup developer interest with client need, I think we're stuck with this situation. (Please feel free to prove me wrong) A generic [donation] button would not help our organisation contribute funds to a project. We need to be actually buying something specific and tangible (that in turn helps us do our work): books and cd's are okay, coffee mugs and t-shirts are not. N dollars for driver X could work too, but items like that are hard to put a fixed price on. My 2c.