[OSGeo-Board] OGC and OSGeo

[Chris Holmes]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Chris Holmes wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
> Chris,
> 
> I like the idea of an "OGC Spec Interest Group" within OSGeo that would
> help provide feedback on OGC specs and that this working group would
> have access to specs under development.   However, my preference would
> be that OGC just allow more public participation.  The whole move to
> RFCs has been partly driven by the need to get wider feedback on specs
> before they are finalized.
I definitely agree.  Perhaps that would be a main task of the OGC 
committee.  Note that talking to Raj was very positive, in terms of OGC 
focusing on more consumer, wide spread use stuff, instead of the heavy 
weight wanking they've been up to.  Towards that end they'd probably be 
more open to more public participation.  So I'm definitely game to push 
them in that direction with OSGeo.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
> /me wonders what sort of patent related agreement I am implicitly operating
> under when I participate in OGC stuff as a part-time DM Solutions staffer.
My impression was that it's very minimal.  Basically that you're not 
going to patent anything that you put in their specs...

Chris

> 
> Best regards,

-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
thoughts at: http://cholmes.wordpress.com
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