[OSGeo-Discuss] relevance of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, and promoting support for open source

[Frank Warmerdam]

jo at frot.org wrote:
> The SPD
> There's been a lot of setup work done on a directory of organisations
> offering support for OSGeo software projects. Just another 20% would
> make it actually useful. http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile 
> is an interesting "advanced" interface but no-one's going to use it
> as-is, none of the SPD gets indexed by search engines because it's all
> query-based. A link-based browsable index to it would help catch
> people who type in phrases like "geoserver support" to yahoo and google. 

Jo,

The Service Provider Directory deliberately does not allow free text
in the OSGeo hosted portion of the service provider descriptions so
I am dubious that making the existing listing info browseable by
searchbots would provide much useful search capability.  The SPD
listings are intended to point to a web page hosted by the service
provider themselves that would contain free text describing their
services and that they presumably will make webbot accessable.

If for nothing other than our limited "outbound link karma" perhaps
it would be good to have our SPD listings indexable.  I wonder if we
could accomplish this with a pointer to a query for all service providers
at some suitable location.

You write "no-one's going to use it as-is".  Is that because you think
the SPD search interface is too hard to use?  It really doesn't seem
all that complicated to me.  At it's simpliest you go to:

   http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile

And hit the "Search" button with no other changes to get a list of
all registered service providers.  Selecting a locale, language or
technology restricts the return list.

> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SPD_Prioritization has some
> plans to highlight companies who employ committers, and of course 
> Foundation sponsors, which would take this effort to the next level. 

It is my intention to follow up on the prioritization proposal with
the community. I'll do that in a separate message.

> But right now it's not at the first level. What is needed to move this
> effort forward, to get it linked from the main OSGeo page, to
> encourage contributions and make it easier to find? 
> Who is focusing time on this right now?

The Service Provider Directory is linked from www.osgeo.org.  It is
the "Service Providers" link under "OSGeo Community" on the left side.

While I'll concede the SPD isn't exactly slick, I'm not sure why you
feel it hasn't reached the "first level" yet.  I'll try and connect in
IRC to discuss it.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org