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<p>All Stakeholders, Project Leaders and OSGeo members :<br>
</p>
<p> <i>I trust this email finds you and yours well at this
challenging time. <br>
</i></p>
<p> Please consider this upcoming situation -- <b>What is the
content of the OSGeoLive 2020 4GB ISO</b>, and <b>what other
delivery formats are important to you and your user and
developer communities</b>. <br>
</p>
<p> --<br>
</p>
<p> Yesterday at the weekly <b>OSGeoLive IRC meeting</b>, the
upcoming OSGeoLive 'Focal' 2020 LTS Linux distro was discussed. We
face a disk space challenge, as usual, but this year it seems that
the entire collection of default apps and specialty apps, has
grown in size. The disk space on a 4GB ISO is full and now
overflowing. <b>There is not enough disk space to fit on the ISO
4GB format,</b> even with clever hacks and careful pruning, as
we have done each year.</p>
<p> In the past, we always ship a Virtual Machine format [1] along
with the ISO, for convenience. The cloud is increasingly
important each year, since the massive increase in raw data,
common now in all sciences and especially geophysical sciences,
requires the cloud to access. It is widely known that the launch
of remote sensing satellites has accelerated, and the data they
provide has accelerated. Cloud-ready environments using Docker
(not preferred) or other toolchains, are important for a wider
audience. At the same time, I believe we need to support desktop
computers for individuals, with or without the Internet.<br>
</p>
<p> So, <b>the ISO format is the natural solution for desktop
computers</b>. A Virtual Machine format is useful, but suffers
from very long download times (3 hours on residential DSL at
300K-per-second) -- an "all or nothing" you could say. Docker
images or other cloud-ready toolchains are increasingly important
in geophysical science, because huge, current data is only
practical using a cloud infrastructure.</p>
<p> A second Point of View. What are the uses of the OSGeo
projects ? Desktop Applications like QGis, only make sense on a
desktop computer. Server software like Geoserver or Mapserver,
have always been hosted across a network, and fit easily into the
cloud model. Command line utilities (GDAL), programming
libraries, and others are somewhere in between.</p>
<p> If the purpose of the ISO disk to to "showcase all OSGeo
Projects", can we leave Geoserver or Mapserver out of the desktop
ISO ? Is this consistant with the mission of OSGeoLive ? This
is a community decision and I open the discussion with this email.</p>
<p> Does OSGeo have the resources, time and energy to supply
cloud-ready toolchains using the formats and plumbing required ?
Will that change over time ? Personally I believe we have to look
at the core, long-term success of various other FOSS software, to
understand what has worked, what is consistent with community
values, and what is practical going forward.</p>
<p> Lastly, I want to highlight one set of projects that is not
OSGeo, but is transforming education at the university level --
Jupyter, JupyterHub and Binder. We have shipped "decent" Jupyter
support since it was called iPython, at OSGeoLive. We can continue
to do this. However the cloud-nature of the Jupyter Notebooks
cuts to the center of this discussion, because Jupyter is easily
accessible for education, is certainly a network-centeric
deployment, and is a common and practical interface to cloud
hosted massive data resources. People probably know that all the
major cloud providers have supported some version of hosted
Jupyter Notebook support in the past four years. The Jupyter brand
is strong, we have a lot in common with the inclusive, educational
mission at Jupyter, and Jupyter Notebooks are easily and naturally
useful in the geophysical sciences, modelling, data science and
other current topics.</p>
<p> thanks and best regards from Berkeley, California --Brian M
Hamlin / MAPLABS / OSGeoLive PSC</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[1] This Virtual Machine format is an image that is recognized by
the major common Virtual Machine host software, and can run in the
cloud or on a local piece of hardware. <a
href="https://live.osgeo.org/en/download.html">https://live.osgeo.org/en/download.html</a></p>
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