2026-09-01 –, Himawari
The GDAL Sponsorship Program changed how the project operates, has resulted in project-wide functionality and improvements, and put the project on a previously unachievable sustainability path.
GDAL is a lynchpin of capability in the geospatial community, but its business model historically looked like the venerable XKCD cartoon. Its development, enhancement, and maintenance was entirely driven by consulting, with most of it coming in the form of a single individual making a business of managing the project. The GDAL Sponsorship Program changed GDAL's business model by relieving pressure on the keystone individuals who hold up our community's software ecosystem by resourcing "maintenance" activities independently from consulting. The sponsorship program resources help grow capable maintainers, pay down decades-old technical debt, and change the economics of project maintenance activities that everyone needs but for which no individual organization can pay. We will describe how it was formed, fundraising lessons learned, how it works, and why it was needed for the project that fills such a critical role in our community's software ecosystem.
GDAL
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Howard Butler is the president of Hobu, Inc., an open source software consultancy located in Iowa City, Iowa that focuses on point cloud data management solutions. He is an author of the Cloud Optimized Point Cloud specification, a Project Steering Committee member of the GDAL, PROJ, and GEOS projects, a contributing author to the GeoJSON specification, an active participant in the ASPRS LAS Committee, and a past member of the OSGeo Board of Directors. With his firm, Howard leads the development of the PDAL software library.