[Board] notice: SAC approval of Request for Services for OSGeo4W project

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl wrote:
> OSGeo should look into officially endorsing this project because it will
> help people to get it past the gate of their data center if they can point
> to an authority. It will also be a good argument when working with
> restricted architectures that abhor anything not distributed by a major
> label.

Arnulf,

It is our hope to have OSGeo4W enter incubation at some point this year
once it has accumulated a sufficient packaging community to be justifiable.
I also hope that OSGeo4W will be considered the endorsed OSGeo distribution
for windows though I'm not really sure what process we would go through
to make that happen.

As for supporting proprietary windows, it isn't my favorite environment
but I'm much more interested in promoting FOSS geospatial software rather
than FOSS OS software.  I often make the point when speaking about OSGeo
(and GDAL) that it is cross platform and moving FOSS4G does not mean having
to make a move to Linux.  I think there are already pretty good options
(FGS, Debian GIS) for Linux though once the OSGeo4W house is in order,
I'd like to look at better OSGeo support for Linux too.

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 OSGeo, http://osgeo.org