Slashgeo

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation discussion mailing list offered some great insights on the OSGeo and its return on equity. From the original message by Howard Butler: "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. [...] Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones." The whole thread is worth reading to understand the potential future of the OSGeo.