[Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

[nicolas bozon]

Hi Board, all

I fully agree with Chris here also.

But i don't with saying that OpenGeo/OSGeo comparison is just a
distraction, with or without the DirectionMag kind of buzz. I am not
speaking about the namings here.

In fact, i think it should be just part of the brainstorming on new OSGeo
directions, and may be governance, the Board and the Foundation is looking
for, now.
Would OSGeo just be the same today without OpenGeo's numerous code
contributions and sponsorships ?
Would some of the Foundation projects be such efficient, popular, and used
worldwide for personal, research or business use ?
.org, .com or even .biz, i think one can easily admit that they are one of
the ***'businesses'*** that most contributed back to geospatial open source
software projects till now.

Why some people may be confused about the differences between the two
.orgs, may be just because OpenGeo is just focussed on improving geospatial
open source software Projects (leading to profit or not i guess). I don't
personnaly think this is what OSGeo fully did in the recent times, at least
not for all projects, incubated, in incubation, externals or relatives.

Back to previous emails, i really think that some more energy, fundings and
promotion should go to the OSGeo coding projects themselves (and also to
OSGeo marketing and Web presence, but this is another point i won't dive in
now). To help the Projects grow, spread, and even work together at times
maybe, and this, whatever the tribe is. Code Sprints aren't sufficent for
this according to me (also because teams have to pay to improve their
software), and i think the more fundings the Foundation could get, the more
the OSGeo Projects should get some real help, in any possible ways.

Only my 2 cents

Best,

Nick



2012/1/5 Michael P. Gerlek <mpg at flaxen.com>

> The string "OpenGeo", unfortunately, does sound very similar to "OSGeo"
> and that they are both nonprofit dot-orgs makes it even more confusing for
> outsiders to keep straight.  And many times I've had to explain to people
> that OSGeo is not the same as OGC, especially since I've been involved in
> both groups.  And I'm old enough to recall the discussions +5 years ago in
> Chicago about what to name ourselves, and whether "open" + "geo" was simply
> too generic and too close to OGC.
>
> But all three organizations have existed peacefully for some years now,
> and so that's all water under the bridge.  Peter's mail is a great start
> towards what we all need to focus on: let us refine our mission and goals
> to reflect the activities the our foundation should and can support, and
> decide as well how much effort we'd like to spend on publicizing that to
> the geo masses.
>
> -mpg
>
> [I wonder if Carl Reed ever has to explain that OGC is not the same as
> OSGeo?]
>
>
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>
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