On the crowdfunding page [1] they revealed causes why they decided to run the campaign:
> Our goals with crowdfunding the development of OpenCV 5 are several: 1) To make OpenCV 5 our biggest release ever, with the most community participation of any version so far, 2) To prove to other struggling open source projects that crowdfunding is a viable option over seeking corporate donations exclusively, 3) To create a sustainable method of fundraising that OpenCV can return to year after year, making the overall organization and project more robust to global instability.
> Recently, due to global conflicts and instability, OpenCV has lost several core team members, and this has slowed progress on both new feature development and the handling of bugs and requests in the GitHub repository.
> Crowdfunding development of a big Open Source project like OpenCV is a big move. We aren’t aware of ANYONE doing it at this scale. As a non-profit organization, we are constantly fighting to find funding, but we always find support in our community. Instead of spending our time chasing big checks from billionaires, we are putting that community front and center.
There are thousands (millions?) of nonprofits who fundraise incessantly—any org that's mission driven without a profit motive needs to have that activity (and the resulting CRM management) as part of their fabric to thrive.
I think a few of the bigger software projects are realizing relying on a few generous whales is unsustainable when money faucets are turned off... and it's a good thing for the long term stability of these groups to figure out how to sustain the core project.
As long as it doesn't get annoying (multiple appeals every quarter, incessant "support us or we'll DIE!" messages...) I'm fine with fundraising initiatives for OSS.
I wonder if they were lost, as in passed away, or just lost as in they live in countries that can’t do business with the organization for legal reasons anymore. Hopefully the latter and they’ll find some way back eventually…
> Our goals with crowdfunding the development of OpenCV 5 are several: 1) To make OpenCV 5 our biggest release ever, with the most community participation of any version so far, 2) To prove to other struggling open source projects that crowdfunding is a viable option over seeking corporate donations exclusively, 3) To create a sustainable method of fundraising that OpenCV can return to year after year, making the overall organization and project more robust to global instability.
> Recently, due to global conflicts and instability, OpenCV has lost several core team members, and this has slowed progress on both new feature development and the handling of bugs and requests in the GitHub repository.
> Crowdfunding development of a big Open Source project like OpenCV is a big move. We aren’t aware of ANYONE doing it at this scale. As a non-profit organization, we are constantly fighting to find funding, but we always find support in our community. Instead of spending our time chasing big checks from billionaires, we are putting that community front and center.
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/opencv-5-support-non-prof...