Leaving the GDAL Project Steering Commitee

I've been on the Project Steering Committee (PSC) of the GDAL project for a few years now. It's a hugely significant software project, one that I'm very fond of, and I like to think that I've had an impact in my time on the committee.

Recently, though, the steering part has become less rewarding. By granting Amazon S3 and its imitators special, featured storage protocols, GDAL is stuck carrying water for big and lucrative cloud service providers and a few hyper-scaling customers that don't adequately support the project. It's a crappy situation, not unique to GDAL. A lot of open source projects find themselves ruthlessly exploited these days. This is my personal view. I don't speak for GDAL.

More importantly, I'm doing less geospatial work these days, and thus I'm increasingly uncertain about the rapidly-changing currents in which the PSC is steering the project. Do things like "GeoParquet" and "GeoArrow" really matter to practitioners who aren't working for a handful of hyper-scaling organizations? Is "GeoAI" for real or is it bullshit? Do we steer the project towards these interests or away from them? I truly don't know. I wish I did.

Can I fully engage with the problems that GDAL faces over the next year? That's my criteria for participating in the PSC. I can't, and so it's time to go. The project is in good shape, I believe, and I hope that I'm making room for someone with a great vision to join it.