[OSGeo-Board] The stack - what is it?

[Frank Warmerdam]

Gary Lang wrote:
> 2) Funding: initial money provided. More available. Need to have a proven funding process (non-ADSK) in place by the sixth month as proof that we can be self-sustaining, in my mind, and non-ADSK money being provided by month 10. This is important for clear independence, which is important for everyone, including Autodesk.

Gary,

I'll take this as encouragement that I ought to come forward with the
motion to form the fundraising committee.

> 9) Operate the annual conference. This is in 4 months, yes? Unclear where we are on this.

There was already a FOSS4G conference committee started before OSGeo launched.
They will operate this years conference which is going to be in Switzerland
in September.

My position is that we have lots to deal with and should not interfere in
this years conference.  We do want to be prepared to take on responsibility
for the conference following September but I don't see alot of action items
on this till then.

> 10) We have not discussed this. I assume the timing of this is related to 9)? 

I think we should talk to the FOSS4G conference committee about this.  If
they are ok with this being an OSGeo award, we could award it at the
conference.  Last year an adhoc conference subcommittee was formed to award
it (I believe).   Last years was the first year it was awarded.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that Markus and I are on the FOSS4G international
steering committee so he and I can take on liason duties.

> Please give me feedback: do I have the current status of 1) - 10) right? Also, let's list who we think are the "owners" of 1) - 10) tommorrow.

There are several of the goals that I am hopeful we will see others step
forward to "own".  In particular, international outreach and the educational
related work.

> On 6), it feels to me like a good service OSGeo might provide is to build 
 > something like FWTools in combination with something like this:
 > http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html, as well as PostGIS, tested and
 > delivered on Linux, OS X, and Windows. Does this make sense  to others?
> 
> What is the success of FWTools to date? # downloads? # list members? 
 > #committers? Should it be an OSGeo project?

In February:

FWTools for windows: 30GB - roughly 2000 successful downloads.

FWTools for linux: 8GB - roughly 300 successful downloads.

FWTools mailing list: 137 members

FWTools Committers: 1 (me)

Note that FWTools is a one man operation.  It fills a particular role
- cutting edge (from cvs) collection of tools ready to use for win32
or any x86 linux.  It would not be a suitable base for a foundation
packaging effort.  The FGS program would be a much more suitable base
to work from for a distribution agnostic linux binary distribution.
MS4W is a rough analog on the windows side.

FGS and MS4W are both DM Solutions projects (hosted on maptools.org)
though FGS started out between Tyler, myself and a few others.

On the linux side we have been discussing a "support group" for packagers.
My hope is that appropriate packages for RPM based distributions would
come out of that, and for Debian things are already progressing well.
A bit trickier is "blessing" a foundation set of binaries.  If we wanted
to do this I think FGS (which is linux distribution agnostic) would be
the best base to work from.

In the short term (2-4 months) I think we should work to bring support
some of the existing packaging efforts but look forward to adopting or
coming up with a way of deliering trustworthy well integrated binaries
for Win32, Linux and MacOS X as you suggest.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
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    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org