> Our goals with crowdfunding the development of OpenCV 5 are several: 1) To make OpenCV 5 our biggest release ever, with the most community participation of any version so far, 2) To prove to other struggling open source projects that crowdfunding is a viable option over seeking corporate donations exclusively, 3) To create a sustainable method of fundraising that OpenCV can return to year after year, making the overall organization and project more robust to global instability.
> Recently, due to global conflicts and instability, OpenCV has lost several core team members, and this has slowed progress on both new feature development and the handling of bugs and requests in the GitHub repository.
> Crowdfunding development of a big Open Source project like OpenCV is a big move. We aren’t aware of ANYONE doing it at this scale. As a non-profit organization, we are constantly fighting to find funding, but we always find support in our community. Instead of spending our time chasing big checks from billionaires, we are putting that community front and center.
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/opencv-5-support-non-prof...