[Board] [Fwd: [Incubator Application] OpenDragon]

[Venkatesh Raghavan]

Hi Frank,

My comments below. David Hastings may also fill up
with additional details

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> FYI
> 
> I have made an initial response to these folks expressing our enthuasism
> about involvement with them, though obviously that is conditional on their
> committing to an open source license.  Perhaps others have useful 
> suggestions
> or feedback for them?
> 
> Venka - do you know these folks?  I've heard of them before but know almost
> nothing about them.

The Kurt Rudahl has been around in the geospatial (RS, image processing)
scene for last 30 years. Their Dragon suite was sold under the banner
of Golden Software since the 80's, I think. 80's was the time we had
the Computer Oriented Geological Society based in Colorado.

Kurt has immigrated to Thailand and had chosen a free (as in beer) as
a model for educational purposes. David and I had discussed with
him to choose free (as in freedom) model and consider bringing the
Dragon suite into the OSGeo umberalla. I am glad to know that
Kurt has contact you. I think we can consider to incubate Dragon
if Kurt agrees to adopting an OSI license for Dragon.

Kind regards

Venka
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Subject:
> [Incubator Application] OpenDragon
> From:
> rudahl at rsgis.net
> Date:
> Fri, 9 Mar 2007 05:27:24 -0700 (MST)
> To:
> incubator_applications at lists.osgeo.org
> 
> To:
> incubator_applications at lists.osgeo.org
> 
> 
>                 9 March 2007
> 
> Dear People,
> 
> I am writing to ask your advice about whether there is a good match
> between OpenDragon and OSGeo.
> 
> Briefly, OpenDragon evolved from Dragon/ips (r) which is arguably the
> oldest remote sensing software for PC's. (Erdas is older, but at that
> time required special add-on hardware.) We created Dragon as
> commercial software because open source hadn't been invented. We never
> got rich selling it, but counting OpenDragon and Dragon together there
> are nearly a thousand installations in more than 45 countries. It is
> fully internationalized and exists in English, French, Portugese,
> Russian, Thai, Indonesian, and Czech with Vietnamese, Mongolian, and
> Chinese under development.
> 
> We have never been happy about our commercial status because our
> objective was to help education in developing countries, not to become
> Captains of Industry. In fact, most developing coutries can not afford
> the software no matter how low the price.
> 
> About three years ago, we decided to explore a move towards open
> source. We were able to persuade our employer, a major university in
> Thailand, to support creation of the OpenDragon project. This is not
> full open source, just an initial step. Within Southeast Asia, the
> software is free for education and the source code is available under
> NDA for education and research.
> 
> During this period, the software has received major revitalization and
> enhancement. Currently a Windows package, three of the four components
> are now fully operational in Linux and conversion of the fourth is
> underway. Since we are software engineers by profession, all software
> and other artifacts are version controlled, unit tests and regression
> test protocols are being created, and modern design methodologies are
> being introduced for new development.
> 
> We are at a significant crossroads. Funding is being sought to provide
> a stable basis for the current level, and to enable us to move
> forward. Our most important objectives are expanding our geographic
> basis to include all developing (at least) coutries, and to develop
> collateral educational materials such as tutorials.
> 
> Whether open source will be a part of the above plan depends to
> a large extent on the objectives of those who will (hopefully) provide
> the funding. We favor open source, either GPL or some more relaxed
> form, but only if we can see a clear path to the project's long-term
> viability by that route.
> 
> Thus, we would appreciate your advice. I look forward to hearing from
> you.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kurt Rudahl
> 
> P.S. We will have a booth at the Association of American Geographers
>      conference in San Francisco in April.
> ======================================================================
> Your Incubator Questionnaire:
> 
> # Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.
> 
> Kurt Rudahl; kurt at cpe.kmutt.ac.th, rudahl at open-dragon.org
> 
> # Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).
> 
> Sally Goldin; seg at open-dragon.org
> 
> # Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all
>   official committers
> 
> # Please describe your Project.
> 
> See above.
> 
> # Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?
> 
> Don't know.
> 
> # Type of application does this project represent(client, server,
>   standalone, library, etc.):
> 
> Standalone at present. Thick client/server supported by the
> architecture.
> 
> # Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.
> 
> None except that we use some open-source components (e.g. libgeotiff).
> 
> # Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.
> 
> See above.
> 
> # Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?
> 
> To be determined. See above.
> 
> # Is there already a beta or official release?
> 
> Current is v 5.10
> 
> # What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis
>   or other higher education, government, or some other source)?
> 
> Commercial
> 
> # Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what
>   extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any
>   standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the
>   project owners to seek certification at some point?
> 
> To be determined
> 
> # Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the 
> copyright?
> 
> Yes. We control it.
> 
> # How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to
>   the project at this time?
> 
> Maybe half-a-dozen
> 
> # How many people have commit access to the source code respository?
> 
> Four
> 
> # Approximately how many users are currently using this project?
> 
> As indicated above, historically there are some 700+ installations.
> 
> # What type of users does your project attract (government,
>   commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?
> 
> Mostly universities for teaching and research. Some government.
> 
> # If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the
>   OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project
>   of the OSGeo Foundation?
> 
> To be determined.
> 
> # Does the project include an automated build and test?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> # What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)
> 
> C/C++/Java. Perl during the build process.
> 
> # What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French,
>   Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?
> 
> English
> 
> # What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How
>   many users do you expect to download the project when it is
>   released?
> 
> Including sampe data it is a bit less than 200 MB
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> 
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