I know a chap that uses it for Arduino-powered drones. He is not a coder.
I agree that projects like OpenCV should be better-supported.
There are a couple of issues, though, that always crop up, when talking about supporting open projects:
1) I don't know of any corporation, anywhere, that actually donates for no reason at all. There's always a hook. Sometimes, it's just brand-building (logo on the free swag stuff), sometimes, it's to attract future employees (for instance, donating to a project that is maintained by a certain set of students from a college curriculum, etc.), sometimes, it's to influence "hearts and minds," and sometimes, it's a pure investment. They need a self-interested reason.
2) I don't know of any corporation, anywhere, that donates, with no expectation of influence. That's one reason why lobbying is such a big deal. There's a fig leaf of "no quid pro quo," but everyone knows that the donator is expecting a return.
3) I don't know if anyone has noticed (</s>), but the corporate environment tends to be, just a bit, on the competitive side. I know many corporations may not be willing to donate to a cause that will serve their competitors, as well as themselves.
I think that foundations help. They can set up a "step and repeat" page, with donors, but keep the branding (and influence) off the actual donations.
Corporations could donate in a way that benefits them. For example, Intel contributes a lot of code to the Linux kernel. Presumably they are at least partially contributing stuff that makes it run better on their chips. But lots of people run Linux on Intel chips. And while working on stuff that benefits Intel, their engineers are probably going to do other ancillary tasks that could be helpful. So it seems like a win-win.
It should be socially acceptable for open source programs to offer the deal: we’ll consider patches from your engineers, but in exchange you have to chip in enough to support one of ours (to keep working on stuff we find interesting), and a little bit more (need some engineer-hours to review your patches).
It sounds quite biased in favor of the project at first, but if the project is popular, the company could get quite a bit out of it.
Is it a bad thing if corporations donate towards features that benefit them? That is a signal to the developers to allocate their energy towards useful ends.
In addition to helping keep the library in development member organizations of OpenCV get some perks as a result of their support such as appearances on our live streams, press releases, and pull request priority. We have tiers for Bronze ($6k/yr), Silver ($30k/yr), Gold ($100k/yr) members with more benefits for each tier.
I very much doubt you can do any image processing on Arduino. A typical Arduino has only 2048 bytes of RAM, like, what kind of an image can fit in there?
I agree that projects like OpenCV should be better-supported.
There are a couple of issues, though, that always crop up, when talking about supporting open projects:
1) I don't know of any corporation, anywhere, that actually donates for no reason at all. There's always a hook. Sometimes, it's just brand-building (logo on the free swag stuff), sometimes, it's to attract future employees (for instance, donating to a project that is maintained by a certain set of students from a college curriculum, etc.), sometimes, it's to influence "hearts and minds," and sometimes, it's a pure investment. They need a self-interested reason.
2) I don't know of any corporation, anywhere, that donates, with no expectation of influence. That's one reason why lobbying is such a big deal. There's a fig leaf of "no quid pro quo," but everyone knows that the donator is expecting a return.
3) I don't know if anyone has noticed (</s>), but the corporate environment tends to be, just a bit, on the competitive side. I know many corporations may not be willing to donate to a cause that will serve their competitors, as well as themselves.
I think that foundations help. They can set up a "step and repeat" page, with donors, but keep the branding (and influence) off the actual donations.