[Libjpeg-turbo-announce] Sponsors/donations are greatly needed

I apologize for interrupting your regularly-scheduled programming with 
another annoying pledge break ...

I am honored to be the maintainer for libjpeg-turbo and to provide the 
enterprise-quality, open-source libjpeg-turbo SDK for free to the 
community.  However, I also don't make a salary for my work on this 
project, nor has there been any company or organization sponsoring my 
work on it for the last year.  Thus, at the moment, every hour I spend 
on libjpeg-turbo is an hour less that I have available for paying work. 
  In January, I spent a great many pro bono hours trying to sort out 
community issues related to the overall direction of this project-- 
including writing a very thorough research paper and numerous position 
statements relating to the controversy around jpeg-9.  This was, I felt, 
important work and a worthwhile investment in the long-term health of 
the project, but because of it, I was only able to bill less than 1/10 
of what I needed during January to pay for my rent and groceries.  If I 
have many more months like that, I won't be able to continue doing much 
work on libjpeg-turbo at all, or I'll have to consider other (perhaps 
unpopular) means of monetizing my labor on it.

I'm not complaining.  I love my job, and I chose to do things this way 
in part because I wanted to give something back to the community.  I'm 
just saying that this project operates a little differently than other 
prominent OSS projects, because I'm an independent developer rather than 
a salaried employee.  I maintain libjpeg-turbo with a very high focus 
and a keen eye toward producing something that is much more than just an 
open source project.  It's an enterprise-quality product, and not only 
that, it's an enterprise-quality product whose development processes are 
100% open and reproducible.  The scripts, code, and techniques used to 
produce these SDKs are "free as in freedom" as well as "free as in 
beer."  I love the fact that we are able to provide a free product that 
rivals commercial high-speed JPEG SDKs in terms of quality, ease of 
installation/use, and performance, and you'd be hard-pressed to find 
many open source projects that can make similar claims.  However, doing 
things this way takes a lot of time and calls upon my decades of 
industry experience.  If I won the lottery, I'd be very pleased to 
donate that time and experience to the community, but at the moment, I'm 
constantly scrambling to find ways of paying my bills so I can continue 
being able to provide libjpeg-turbo as a free service.

Even the smallest donation toward our cause helps out.  If your 
organization is benefiting financially from using libjpeg-turbo (for 
instance, using it in a commercial product), then please consider how 
much money you would be spending each year to renew your organization's 
licenses for a commercial high-speed JPEG SDK.  If every commercial 
organization that was using libjpeg-turbo donated even a small fraction 
of that amount to our project, we'd be set.  100% of all donation money 
is used to fund my continued labor in maintaining The libjpeg-turbo 
Project, and if there is any left over, it goes toward "hot projects" 
(see below) that currently have no sponsorship.

Donations can be made through SourceForge at the following link:

https://sourceforge.net/p/libjpeg-turbo/donate

We also have several "hot projects" that are in need of financial 
sponsorship.  If your organization could benefit from one of these, 
please consider fronting the money to pay for its development.  A list 
of these can be found here:

http://www.libjpeg-turbo.org/About/ProfessionalServices

Darrell