Thanks
As of 2024, GDAL has now a 26 year-long existence, and many individuals, companies, and Sponsors have contributed to its development and success. While it is always difficult to properly acknowledge all contributions, a few individuals particularly stand out:
Frank Warmerdam, creator of GDAL, initial chair of its Project Steering Committee (PSC) and maintainer from 1998 to 2012, founding member of OSGeo, and currently Principal Engineer at Planet. GDAL would not be what is is without his outstanding work. Support for GeoTIFF, JPEG, PNG, VRT, Shapefile, CSV, PostGIS and dozens of other popular (or niche) formats, as well as gdal_translate, gdalwarp, ogr2ogr and most other utilities are all to be credited to Frank.
Howard Butler, director of Hobu Inc., active on GDAL since 2004, contributor to the Python SWIG bindings, PSC member, founding member of OSGeo. Howard was the coordinator of the fundraising that lead to the advent of GDAL 3 and PROJ 6, and since 2021, he has been instrumental in setting up the GDAL Sponsorship Program and serves as its head, liaising with our sponsors and NumFOCUS, and hosting GDAL contributor monthly meetings.
Jukka Rahkonen, Chief IT Specialist at the National Land Survey of Finland, power-user and long-time passionate of GDAL, PSC member. Over the last 15 years, Jukka has been tirelessly helping users and triaging reports on the issue tracker and other support forums.
Even Rouault, involved since 2007, main maintainer since 2014, current PSC chair, director of Spatialys. Even has authored dozens of drivers (and happy to have managed to retire a few of them!) and many enhancements. He has also been involved in code modernization, extension of the regression test suite, continuous integration and security efforts.
Among code contributors, we want to acknowledge the key, past or current, documentation or code contributions of the following persons:
Ben Ahmed Daho Ali: SXF driver
Jorge Arevalo: PostGIS Raster driver
Dan Baston: modernization of the Python test suite and Python bindings.
Norman Barker: JPIPKAK and TileDB drivers, PSC member.
Dmitry Baryshnikov: SXF and CAD drivers and the GNM component.
Andrew Bell: gdal_viewshed enhancements.
Pete Bunting: KEA driver.
Ragi Yaser Burhum: FileGDB driver.
Brian Case: LIBKML driver.
Victor Chernetsky: AmigoCloud driver.
Benjamin Collins: SWIG Java bindings.
Christopher Condit: OGR to KML conversion.
Nyall Dawson: GeoPackage, OpenFileGDB, ODBC/PGeo and OGR core enhancements. Past co-maintainer.
Jürgen Fischer: NAS driver.
Alessandro Furieri: Spatialite support in SQLite driver, enhancements in GML driver.
Andrea Giudiceandrea: documentation fixes
Ari Jolma: Author of (ex) SWIG Perl bindings.
Trent Hare: PDS, ISIS2 and ISIS3 drivers.
Björn Harrtell: FlatGeoBuf driver.
Thomas Hirsch: SOSI driver.
François Hissel: Selafin driver.
Pirmin Kalberer: Interlis drivers.
Andrey Kiselev: BMP, HDF4, HDF5, L1B, MrSID and RMF support, gdal_grid, past PSC member.
Dan Jacobson: documentation enhancements.
Kor de Jong: PCRaster driver.
Peter A. Jonsson: Docker scripts enhancements.
Chaitanya Kumar CH: past GDAL maintainer.
Martin Lambers: GTA driver.
Martin Landa: VFK driver.
Kikitte Lee: Two-Arm chains edge tracing algorithm of gdal_polygonize.
Alexandr Lisovenko: SXF driver
Mateusz Łoskot: GeoJSON driver, (ex) Windows CE support, past GDAL maintainer.
Ivan Lucena: Idrisi, Intergraph and Oracle drivers, (ex) Windows build scripts.
Hugo Mercier: marching square algorithm of gdal_contour
Idan Miara: gdal-utils Python package.
Martin Mikita: PDFium backend of the PDF driver.
Hiroshi Miura: Initial CMake build system.
Vincent Mora: WAsP driver
Daniel Morissette: CPL library, MapInfo .mif/.tab and Arc/Info vector coverage (AVC) support, PSC member.
Denis Nadeau: netCDF support.
Markus Neteler: various contributions to GDAL documentation
Adam Nowacki: WMS driver.
Jens Oberender: KML driver.
Alessandro Pasotti: co-maintainer since 2022.
Kai Pastor: contributions to the CMake build system.
Abel Pau: MiraMon driver.
Matthew Perry: gdaldem
Mark Phillips: TIGER driver.
Lucian Plesea: ESRIC and MRF drivers.
Petr Pridal: gdal2tiles utility.
Paul Ramsey: GeoPackage and FileGDB drivers.
Bas Retsios: MSG driver.
Didier Richard: Geoconcept driver.
Kevin Ruland: SWIG bindings refactor.
Maxim Rylov: Hana driver.
Michael Scholz: OpenDRIVE driver.
Kurt Schwehr: code linting through the whole codebase, PSC member.
Avyav Kumar Singh: enhancements in the OGR geometry support, SFCGAL support.
Craig de Stigter: port of GDAL Python autotest suite to the pytest framework.
Michael Sumner: documentation enhancements, vrt:// enhancements.
Tamas Szekeres: SWIG CSharp bindings, gdal_viewshed, PSC member.
Alan Thomas: major enhancements in the DXF driver.
Etienne Tourigny: major enhancements in the netCDF driver.
Philippe Vachon: COASP, GFF, JaxaPalsar, TSX drivers.
Stephane Villeneuve: OGR Feature Style support, MapInfo .mif.
Yorick de Wid: LVBAG driver.
Chris Yesson: gdaldem
Graphical contributions:
Marin Byrne: for producing the current GDAL icon set (based on the earlier version by Martin Daly).
Darek Krawczyk: for producing design of the initial GDAL Team Member t-shirt (based on Marin's and Martin's graphics).
Joe Morrison: for producing the new GDAL t-shirt
Packaging:
Alpine Linux: Holger Jaekel
Debian: Bas Couwenberg, Francesco Paolo Lovergine
Conda-Forge: Filipe Fernandes, Daryl Herzmann and others
Fedora: Sandro Mani
GISInternals: Tamas Szekeres
Homebrew: GDAL Homebrew maintainers
MS4W: Jeff McKenna
OpenBSD: Landry Breuil
OSGeo4W: Jürgen Fischer
netBSD: Greg Troxel
Spack: Adam J. Stewart
Ubuntu: Angelos Tzotsos
vcpkg: Kai Pastor
You can also consult Frank Warmerdam's sponsors, acknowledgments and credits for the period 1998-2010.