GPSD and OSGEO

[Frank Warmerdam]

Eric,

Thanks for your email about GPSD, GPS standards, and your support of OSGeo.
It has been forwarded to the board.

I'm not speaking on behalf of the board since we haven't considered your
email as a group yet, but thought I would give you a bit of feedback on
where we are.

We have eight official projects that we accepted as foundation projects
when we launched and we anticipate it will be several more months before
we have completed the legal, organizational and technical process of
integrating them into the foundation.  Till that is complete or nearly
complete we aren't anticipating considering any additional projects.

However, we are interested in identifying key projects that fill gaps
in our "GIS stack".  I personally have had little direct interaction
with GPS applications and hadn't actually considered this in a recent
"stack review", but now that you bring it to my attention it seems
like an obvious thing we would like to have covered.

We haven't worked out all the details of what it means to be a foundation
project yet, but at the least it would mean verifying code provenance and
getting signed contributor agreements from committers.  We are also hoping
for some common infrastructure, and cooperative branding (web site look
etc), though how important that would be isn't clear.

Whether GPSD is an official foundation projects or not, it is still (from
my limited awareness over the years) the most mature open source GPS
package, and so we would consider it part of our stack whether it is a
foundation project or not.

We have also taken a position that we support and promote use of standards
for interoperability.  It is a little less clear whether we would take
an active role in developing standards, though many organizations involved in
OSGeo are quite active in that regard.  I don't know too much about how
standards are developed in the GPS world.

I also appreciate your general statement of support for the goals of OSGeo.
We have already taken it as a core principle that we would only accept
software under an OSI approved license.  I would add that reading your
writings back in 1998 was an important part of my personal decision to
go independent and make a career of writing open source software.

I don't know if, or how long it may take the board to make an official
response or suggest a relationship between GPSD and OSGeo as we have a lot
on our plate currently.  But I will keep this in mind, and I hope to be
back in contact with you and the GPSD team at some point.

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    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org