[mrtg-announce] OSS Sponsorship 2013

[Tobias Oetiker]

Hey Users,

It's this time of year again where I am looking for sponsorships to
support my open source coding activities ... It would be wonderful
if you would consider a sponsorship for 2013.

Offers remain the same as in previous years. I am looking for
individuals and organizations taking up a one year sponsorship for
MRTG, RRDtool or SmokePing. For each of the projects there are:

   1'000 USD silver sponsorships (you get mentioned on the respective
             sponsor page on the website, with logo and link to your
             homepage)

  10'000 USD gold sponsorships (you get mentioned on all pages of the
             website, with logo and link to your homepage. A maximum of two
             gold sponsors per project are possible)

Anonymous sponsorships or other arrangements can be
discussed on request.


A look back on 2012 OSS activity
--------------------------------

* MRTG keeps getting small updates, as people find new ways to break
  the code.

* RRDtool has been moved to github to allow easier participation for
  contributors. A continuous stream of little updates and bug fixes is
  getting added to the code base. A new release, consolidating the
  updates is due in a few weeks.

  The 2.x project has been started. More on this below.

* Moving SmokePing to github, converting to autoconf and adding
  FastCGI support has proven successful. Only a handful of bugs had to
  be fixed this year and several contributions could be integrated
  into the code base.

All three projects continue to be supported by the wonderful group of
individuals, providing helpful answers to user questions on the
mailing lists.

In addition, I spent time working on the following new OSS projects:

Extopus - the generic monitoring front end - www.extopus.org
	  (sponsored by a contract of UPC cablecom)

Qroombo - a room booking system (work in progress)
	  (for a none-profit organization on my own spare time)

VeryVault - an offline capable mobile database web app with encryption and
            sync back to the server (work in progress)
	    (hacking for fun)

All my active OSS coding projects can be found on

  https://github.com/oetiker


A look ahead to 2013
--------------------

Apart from continuing to maintain the current projects and working on
my new code, I have one major objective for 2013:

   To create a major update to RRDtool.

Ideas for what should be done have been flying around for years, but
nothing has happened. The major obstacle was the lack of
funding.

Since RRDtool is part of the 'Internet infrastructure' most people
take its presence for granted. Virtually everyone is using it while
only a few organizations sponsor the project's continued maintenance
and development.

Instead of hoping for a white knight to appear, I have decided to try
a crowd funding approach to raise the necessary ressources. See

     github.com/oetiker/rrdtool-2.x

for details. At present, I am still building the feature list for the
new system, please add your ideas to the issue tracker on github.


I wish you all good success in 2013
and all the best

Tobi Oetiker


-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
http://it.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch ++41 62 775 9902 / sb: -9900