FOSS4G NA 2024

Building the GDAL Sponsorship Program
09-10, 10:30–11:00 (America/Chicago), Grand H

Throughout much of its life, GDAL has suffered from "random person in Nebraska" syndrome. The GDAL Sponsorship Program relieves the pressure on the keystone individuals who hold up our community's software ecosystem by resourcing "maintenance" activities independently from consulting.


GDAL is a 25 year old software project that provides backbone implementations of formats, network protocols, and processing techniques for the geospatial community. GDAL development had historically been driven by consulting, with most of its development and maintenance coming in the form of a single individual making a business of managing the project. This worked until it could not, and the GDAL Sponsorship Program (GSP) reduced the project's Nebraska Syndrome by growing additional capable maintainers, paying down decades-long technical debt, and changing the economics of project maintenance activities that everyone needs but for which no individual organization can pay. We will describe how it was formed, how it works, and why it was needed for the project that fills such a critical role in our community's software ecosystem.