My MapServer Foundation thoughts

[Lester Caine]

Tyler Mitchell wrote:

> I appreciate the concern from those of you who have built your businesses on 
> MapServer, I certainly don't have as much at stake.  But what I don't 
> understand is why, for the broader community's benefit, the PR issue is such 
> a barrier.  Is that really standing in the way of your wanting to be involved 
> in what you argue is a good idea?

As you will see from my sig, I am someone how has some experiance of 
Foundations related to Open Source products. Firebird is probably a 
special case, since the original Interbase was a commercial product, but 
Firebird is totally free of any restrictions, and the Foundation funds 
the core development team. We have some major contributors who fund 
their own developments, but all of that work is then rolled back into 
the open source product - towards a single goal.

There are a number of commercial developments that provide overlays to 
the core Firebird engine, and these can be considered as client and and 
management tools which make applications in particular areas easier to 
maintain and so are profitable. Since MapServer is the core engine and 
there are various editor and client applications available, the model is 
not to different.

The potential structure is not that dissimilar to that of Firebird but 
the major thing we found was that there should only be ONE target 
engine. Currently effort is split between two branches which address 
different problems and other branches were developing from that but now 
that the effort is being directed to a SINGLE code base things are a lot 
better. The 'Classic' and 'Superserver' versions of Firebird will still 
be maintained since they have plusses and minuses, but they are combined 
in the one core engine that provides an identical interface for who ever 
accesses it ( Along with the embeded version - but that is another story 
;) )

Separate 'parallel' projects just divide effort, a single target is much 
more practical in the long run! Then there need be only one MapServer !!

-- 
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.