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:

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:

You can also consult Frank Warmerdam's sponsors, acknowledgments and credits for the period 1998-2010.