Dear all,
In order to make money donations easier, the GRASS GIS project has
decided to use the Open Collective platform with the Open Source
Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation as its fiscal host:
https://opencollective.com/grass. You can donate money via credit card,
PayPal, or bank transfer (US account - for EU account please contact
us). This new platform replaces our old PayPal Money Pool.
Although most of the work on GRASS GIS happens on a voluntary basis (or
donated by organizations and companies in the form of working time of
their staff), money donations are very important for the development of
GRASS GIS as they allow us to organize face-to-face coding sessions
(sprints), finance infrastucture needs (web site, etc) and sometimes pay
developers to work on important but tedious bug fixes or high community
value enhancements. The new platform allows both individuals and
companies or organizations to contribute to the GRASS GIS budget.
We would also like to take the opportunity to thank those who have
already contributed money in the last years. You can see a complete list
of sponsors on https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sponsors. Whatever the
amount your help is deeply appreciated !
We particularly encourage companies and organizations that use GRASS GIS
in their daily work to consider contributing. As an example of such
company support we wish to highlight the very generous donation recently
received from Bohannan Huston, Inc. (https://bhinc.com/). We asked
Robert S. Dzur, Vice President Spatial Data, to explain their motivation
behind supporting the project. Here is what he has to say:
"Our use of GRASS GIS is primarily related to areas of data inventory,
visualization, quality assessment and analysis. As data producers, we
are regularly confronted with production challenges related to ingesting
and visualizing high data volumes of imagery, elevation / point cloud
and feature data. GRASS GIS gives us the ability to quickly handle
large datasets at any point in the production stage. For example, we
use r.in.lidar and its capacity to read large multi-billion point
datasets from a text list and create derivative elevation data products
often to support both quality assurance tasks as well as base maps for
vector feature data development. GRASS GIS's multiplatform (Windows,
Mac, Linux) support and integration with GDAL/OGR is also a plus for us.
GRASS GIS gives us direct control, access, and the ability to interact
with our data at very granular levels. My colleague, Dennis Sandin also
reminded me that one of the greatest benefits of GRASS GIS is that its
environments gives us a plethora of options for manipulating data and
testing/designing our automation/workflow processes. We also appreciate
the GRASS GIS legacy and its long history of development dating back to
its genesis with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the continued
scientific foundations of its applications.
Over the past few years, we have been making a concerted effort on two
fronts to 1) support the geospatial open-source community and 2) reduce
our dependence on commercial software. Typically, our support had been
through sponsoring the broader community through code sprint events.
Last year, however, with code sprints on-hold we decided to contribute
to the QGIS crowdfunding campaign for point cloud functionality. At the
same time, we attempted to make a corresponding reduction in our
commercial licensing contracts. This year we have also been trying to
reach out to some of our key clients and teach team how to use GRASS GIS
on their own computing infrastructure. Specifically, we engaged with
one client to teach them how to use r.in.pdal to develop elevation range
maps from LiDAR point cloud data as a complementary data element in
their NDVI analysis to identify vegetation canopy. Another client was
interested in merging DEM data of differing source lineage and quality
and we conducted a basic how to session on GRASS GIS with them and
shared details about r.patch and r.patch.smooth. Given those recent
technical exchange efforts locally with some of our clients, our
experience with GRASS GIS, and our objective to support a specific
open-source project, this year we decided to contribute to the GRASS GIS
project.
If there are companies or organizations like us who are not already
using GRASS GIS to improve their workflows, they should be."
Convinced you want to support GRASS GIS financially ? Go to
https://opencollective.com/grass !
The GRASS GIS development team
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