OGC and OSGeo

[Chris Holmes]

Hey guys, so a couple days ago I met with Raj Singh, who works for the 
OGC (and completely understands open source, he's a great resource for 
us there).

He expressed a lot of interest in having good links between OGC and 
OSGeo, having our members participate in the process of creating new 
specs and improving existing ones.

I related that we'd very much like to, but that the main problem for 
most OS projects was access to the specs.

Opening it up to all our members (including non-voting) would obviously 
be extreme and not good for the OGC, and I don't think we would like to 
make the line directly those who have voting membership.  They're also 
concerned that a company like Refractions could avoid paying OGC fees by 
just going through the OSGeo loophole.

The best idea we came up with was an OGC-contributors (or -interest, or 
another name) committee.  It would be a list of people who are 
interested in contributing to the process of making the specs.  Just as 
a normal project would have 'committers', rewarded for significant 
patches and smart suggestions, so too could the OGC OSGeo committee. 
But the 'right' that they would get, instead of commit rights, would be 
access to the specs, and the whole process of giving feedback and all. 
So they would be vetted, not just opening up the specs to everyone.

Raj is talking with the rest of the OGC guys today, and I said I'd see 
what our board thought.  The other thought I had was for them to vet our 
contributors agreement.  They need to be sure that no one contributes 
ideas that have patents on them and the like, they have a bit of an ip 
review/contributors agreement.  I think ideally we could just re-use our 
CLA, that ours would cover the same subset as theirs, and that the 
process of joining the dev. group of the OGC-contributors committee 
would involve signing the same CLA as everyone else.  But if that can't 
work it could be ok that contributrs just sign a different license 
agreement.

thoughts?

-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
thoughts at: http://cholmes.wordpress.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: cholmes.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 269 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/attachments/20060303/71267708/attachment.vcf>