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Sponsor Our Project

The VirtualGL Project relies on financial sponsorship in order to be able to supply our enterprise-quality remote 3D display software for free. If your organization has benefited from using VirtualGL or TurboVNC, then please consider sponsoring our project so that we can continue to provide this valuable service to your organization and others.

Sponsorship can take two forms. Project sponsors contribute money to pay for a specific feature/fix to be implemented in the software. General sponsors donate money toward the "general fund", which is used to pay for continued maintenance, integration of features/fixes submitted by the community, and hot projects that are not paid for by project sponsors.

In addition to this, professional support and services are offered for VirtualGL and TurboVNC at reasonable hourly rates, including (but not limited to):

• Specifying 3D servers for use with VirtualGL, based on specific application requirements
• Addressing interaction issues between specific applications and VirtualGL or TurboVNC
• Designing and supporting complex, multi-user remote display environments
• Performing comprehensive performance evaluation and benchmarking
• Eliminating performance bottlenecks in existing remote display environments
• Integrating with various grid environments
• Accelerating/hand tuning image codecs, including development of custom image transports for VirtualGL

My resume can be found on my LinkedIn profile. You can also contact me through direct E-Mail by clicking here .

Organizations who sponsor The VirtualGL Project or purchase professional services at a level of US$1000 or greater can opt to have their logo displayed on the Sponsors page.

The Sponsorship Model

Sponsorship of an open source project is different from the proprietary model of development with which many companies may be familiar. When contracting with a software developer, a company will usually secure their rights to the code by asking the developer to sign an intellectual property agreement that assigns ownership of the code to the company. With open source code, however, your rights to the code are automatically granted through the open source license, not through a contract. The open source license is such that your organization-- and anyone else-- can use the software freely, even though you don't technically "own" it.

You can think of open source sponsorship as a "pay it forward" system. Whereas your investment in an open source project produces technology that others can also leverage, others have already paid for technology that your organization can leverage (or is currently leveraging.) Thus, the advantage to your organization from investing in open source is that you can pay for only the enhancements/fixes that you need rather than paying for the whole product. Bear in mind that millions of dollars have been invested into the development of VirtualGL and TurboVNC over the years, and at least that much would have to be invested in any proprietary software product that attempted to provide the same functionality. However, paying to add a specific feature or fix generally only costs 3-4 figures rather than 7. You can also get free testing resources from the community, assuming others are interested in the feature for which you are paying.

Hot Projects

If your organization could benefit from one or more of the proposed modifications below, please consider sponsoring the development of that feature.

• Acceleration for arithmetic coding in libjpeg-turbo (arithmetic coding reduces the size of JPEG images significantly, which could increase the frame rate of VirtualGL/TurboVNC significantly in bandwidth-constrained situations.)
• Using FBO's in VirtualGL instead of Pbuffers
• Improving SSH tunneling support in the TurboVNC Viewer
  • Addressing limitations in the experimental -via and -tunnel options implemented in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer (such as the inability to use the feature with PuTTY)
  • Possibly using libssh in the native viewers to provide a more integrated solution
  • Providing GUI support for the SSH tunneling features
• Improving the TurboVNC Viewer GUI on Unix/Linux systems. There are two possible ways to address this:
  • Making the Windows TurboVNC Viewer cross-platform. This would involve converting the GUI code such that it uses a cross-platform toolkit such as GTK, as well as introducing other platform-specific code for Unix.
  • Figure out how to improve the drawing performance of the Java TurboVNC 1.2+ Viewer on Linux. The Java viewer already has a great GUI and decodes as quickly as the native viewer. It just has poor drawing performance at the moment, but it might be possible to address this by using a JNI drawing library such as jsdl.