[OSGeo-Board] Another open source geospatial initiative ?

[Chris Holmes]

I actually talked in person with Andreas a couple months ago, and also 
met a number of the 52N guys at foss4g.  They're actually making 
progress on their governance structure, at first all code was owned by 
conterra, now it's owned by the 52N organization.  They tried to make it 
a non-profit, but it was too difficult for some reason, so they're 
making it a normal company, but putting in to company charter a lot of 
non-profit type stuff.

I told him that their website gave a bad impression, made them seem 
super top down and not really open source oriented.  But to a person 
everyone I've met involved with it is actually quite in to open source. 
  It's mostly a bunch of academics, and 52N basically gives their 
university a good feeling about their people contributing.  Universities 
can understand that they're joining some consortium, and then have to 
devote their resources (people and monetary) to it.  And the people 
working on it then get to contribute to open source.

We also talked about working more closely, and found good synergies, in 
that they're mostly looking in to cutting edge research/academic stuff, 
and don't want to do the day to day work of keeping a project going when 
it gets wider acceptance.  OSGeo seems much more formed to help those 
that are going to be 'true' open source projects.  So if they have any 
big successes they could potentially be interested in having things go 
in to OSgeo.  And we talked about making sure our projects work 
together, aren't replicating work and the like.  But for now they're 
mostly academics with a place to release their code open source, and 
conterra gets some open source PR. (imho)

best regards,

Chris




Arnulf Christl wrote:
> Hi,
> yes, I know them and had a diversity of interesting discussion too :-).
> Actually it does look a little like another initiative, but it is rather
> small and they have some (imnsho) flaws in their governance structures.
> They are one of the commercial service proivderd sponsoringthe Open Source
> Park which runs under the flag of the OSGeo, so this maybe symbolizes
> which dimension of initiative we are looking at. But they will be an
> interesting resource for the German community.
> 
> I did post a link around regarding governance of this project some time
> back. ESRI has bought a majority share of conterra and conterra is the
> project lead of 52N, so this in a warped sense meand that ESRI is actually
> into developing Open Source. This will be fun to sort out...
> 
> I will add some pictures of our OSGeo booth soon and write up a report but
> this will take me a few days as I will be in non-connected ouback for a
> few days.
> 
> Best regards,
> Arnulf.
> 
> On Thu, October 12, 2006 04:48, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
>> Do anyone of you know more about this 52 north entity.  Responding to the
>> slashgeo.org posting (below) and osgeo discuss would help clear some air.
>>
>> I assume Arnulf knows about them?
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>> -----------------
>> +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>> | 52North: New Open Source Geospatial Initiative                     |
>> |   from the how-obscure-press-release-can-be dept.                  |
>> |   posted by Satri on Wednesday October 11, @10:53 (Open Source Comm|
>> |   http://industry.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/11/1319233     |
>>
>> +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>> Here's a part of the press release: [0]Ann Hitchcock writes "[...]
>> 52°North is an open initiative that strives to advance the development of
>> cutting edge open source geospatial software. The initial focii of the
>> open source technology development are Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Web
>> Security and Digital Rights Management (DRM). The members anticipate that
>> other streams of work will open up according to community direction.
>> [...]" You can read the full press release below. Now, can anyone tell me
>> if there is a relation between this initiave and the [1]Open Source
>> Geospatial Foundation?
>>
>> This story continues at:
>>     http://industry.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/11/1319233
>>
>> Discuss this story at:
>>     http://industry.slashgeo.org/comments.pl?sid=06/10/11/1319233
>>
>> Links:
>>     0. mailto:hitchcock at 52north.org
>>     1. https://www.osgeo.org/
>>
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> 
> 

-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
http://topp.openplans.org

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