You may be wondering where Oslandia’s name is coming from ? Or maybe you already know ? In this article we focus on the “OS” part of Oslandia : OpenSource !
Oslandia positions itself as IT expert in the field of OpenSource geographical information systems. QGIS is namely one of the proheminent opensource softwares for the geospatial industry. This position is a key element of our business model.
But do you know how we work behind the scene ? This article will give you an opportunity to discover some of our contributions to the OpenSource ecosystem.
Principles
Our general business model is based on projects we carry out for our clients. They fund us to design and implement solutions adapted to their needs and requirements. Part of these developments consist in core development of Opensource software. This allows us to contribute actively to FOSS4G components.
But this funding method makes it complicated to fund maintenance, or new exploratory developments, as well as communication, community management or other tasks necessary for healthy opensource projects.
As a consequence, we introduced at Oslandia a mechanism of internal OpenSource project grants.
These grants constitute self-investment from the company into the OpenSource ecosystem, and can be applied to new projects, research and development or existing projects.
This mechanism has multiple interests :
- For opensource projects : maintenance and new contributions
- For Oslandia : image and potential new business opportunities
- For the team : work on projects that matter to them
These OpenSource grants consist in a large range of possible tasks, as we often say : “Opensource projects are not only code”. Instead of developers, we prefer the term contributors. Development, code review, maintenance, documentation, community management, communication, each collaborator can choose the type of task to focus on.
We differentiate software maintenance grants and opensource project grants. We call the latter “OpenSource mini-projects”
Software maintenance consists in refactoring, bugfixing, packaging, release management… All these tasks need dedicated time which is difficult to fund directly on client’s project.
Opensource mini-projects grants are specific opensource proposal which can be submitted by any collaborator on any subject. We then vote on the best proposal and the team can start working on the subject within the allocated budget.
