Licenses; was: something else

[Gary Lang]

I understand all this, and anticipate the MapServer/GeoTools discussions
will go as you describe.

We should really keep the forward-thinking raison d'etre of the
foundation in mind though in all this. After all we're not doing this to
observe the world the way it is but to change it. 

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Warmerdam [mailto:fwarmerdam at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Frank
Warmerdam (External)
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 12:37 PM
To: Gary Lang
Cc: OSGeo Board
Subject: Re: Licenses; was: something else

Frank Warmerdam:
> "I am sure many of the foundation projects will not choose to use 
> foundation infrastructure for their projects, and there is no great 
> harm in a diversity of hosting/service options.  "

Gary Lang wrote:
> Unless I am misunderstanding you, I guess I fundamentally disagree.
> 
> The benefit of a coherent, organized, single-search site with branding

> is of great value to the end-user and for many of the reasons we 
> agreed to at the meeting. Doing what you describe reduces the 
> effectiveness of the foundation and makes it much less likely to be 
> taken seriously in the manner we all hoped, get funding or
sponsoships, etc.
> 
> It really makes the foundation nothing much more than a fancy version 
> of http://www.opensourcegis.org/.

Gary,

Well, I think this is something we will need to dig into more deeply.

I think it is going to be very hard to convince all the projects to
migrate to common infrastructure, web site appearance and so forth.
One of the common themes I heard in Chicago was that project autonomy
not be trod on heavily.

In the case of GDAL, it is my hope that I can use CSS and/or standard
headers and footers for my web pages to make them fit into a foundation
theme.  But, for the forseeable future I expect to continue using
"doxygen" to generate the pages from my source code, and some documents
in "doxygen format".

The GeoTools folks are likely to want to stick with their Convergence
Wiki for their whole site.

The MapServer crew has made it clear they aren't ready to chunk all the
work sunk into the "next generation" Plone site.

So, from that point of view, I don't see us being able to converge on a
single web platform in the forseeable future.

One reason I asked about how the "site search" feature worked last week
was to get a sense if content hosted off the collabnet machines would
be easily incorporated into the site search.   I hope that can be done!
Likewise, for something generated nightly, like the GDAL site, it isn't
really practical to have it re-committed to SVN each night.  Is that
going to interfere with hosting it on collabnet's system?  If so, I
don't mind it staying where it is but I would like to see some degree of
integration.

I think this is a topic that will need some further, in depth,
discussion.
And we might want to reach out to project leads from different projects
to get their feedback on what degree of commonality they are willing to
reach for.

Best regards,
-- 
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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    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent