GDAL/OGR Annual Report 2007

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Frank Warmerdam

Key Accomplishments

• GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 Release
  • Over 20 new drivers added.
  • Five new feature RFCs implemented
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 Release
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3, and 1.4.4 stable branch releases
  • The 1.4.x series represents the first time the project maintained a stable branch from which bug fix releases could be issued.
  • The 1.4.x series included nearly 200 bug fixes
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 Release
  • Six new drivers
  • Many bug fixes and new features
• $32500 USD in funds collected from nine sponsors - thanks to Analytical Graphics/AGI (Gold), i-cubed, Cadcorp, Safe Software, SRC, ACT, Waypoint and INGRES.
• Mateusz Loskot was contracted using project sponsorship funds
• Added Tamas Szekeres and Even Rouault to the project steering committee
• Added 12 new Commiters
• Migrated the mailing lists, web site and bug tracking to OSGeo
• Utilization of Trac wiki for user contributed documentation.
• Partial translation of the web pages to Portuguese.
• A one day sprint/hack-a-thon at FOSS4G, including distribution of "Team GDAL" t-shirts.
• Three Google Summer of Code student projects.

Areas for Improvement

• The 1.4.3 release included ABI (application binary interface) breakage and had to be retracted. Better review and testing mechanisms are needed to avoid breaking our ABI stability guarantees.
• While substantial progress was made over the year, the project still struggles with many old bug reports that have not been addressed.
• Additional outreach to projects and products using GDAL is required to ensure their needs are being met.
• Improve our provision of "standard binaries" for at least Win32, Linux and MacOS X. The OSGeo4W effort may be helpful in this regard for Win32.
• Broaden the coverage of the test suite (more formats, more special cases)
• Seek, and incorporate feedback from sponsors and the community via the SponsorshipSurvey Survey going out with this annual report.

Opportunities to Help

• Contribute to documentation - especially FAQ, special build notes, language specific examples and suggestions and general how-to topics - add these in the Trac wiki!
• Seek additional sponsorships, to provide more stable maintainer funding.
• Testing and quality bug reports are always valuable.

Outlook for 2008

The growth of the base of project developers is very encouraging, and will hopefully continue. The coming year is an opportunity to continue to professionalize and community-ize project maintenance reducing the reliance on any one contributor. I also see this as a year when we need to work to make the projects technical strengths accessible to more projects through continued improvements to language bindings and documentation, and to more end users via easy to use standard binaries (eg. OSGeo4W).

I also look forward to more funded maintainer hours available to deal with our bug report backlog, and to ensure timely response to new bug reports. This will hopefully provide a payback to sponsors, and ensure a continued positive technical reputation for the project.

Sponsorship Funds Report

Sponsors

Item	Amount
i-cubed	5000.00
AGI	9000.00
Cadcorp	3000.00
Safe Software	3000.00
SRC	3000.00
ACT	3000.00
Waypoint	3000.00
Microimages	500.00
INGRES	3000.00
Subtotal	32500.00
OSGeo 25%	8125.00
Net Total	24375.00

Includes sponsorships received in late 2006.

Expenditures

Item	Amount
Mateusz - Jan to Aug.	4395.00
Mateusz - Sept to Dec	6426.00
Mateusz - FOSS4G	1700.00
T-shirts	626.00
Total	13147.00

Sponsorship Balance: $11228.00 USD