[OSGeo-Discuss] New Mexico local chapter?

[Zachary L. Stauber]

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Perry, Gary, Tim, Mark, Richard, thank you all for your support.  I'm looking
forward to a local chapter (it would be the first in the US, hard as it is to
believe).  As for the education suggestions, thank you once again.  I'll get Amy
Ballard in touch with the education project at OSGeo since she is the GIT chair
at our community college.  Karl and I are thinking of tag teaming a class, and
he has some curriculum built up, but it would be best if it was built around
what OSGeo had in mind.

I spoke with Tyler today about the chapter and I have attempted to address an
apparently unique issue.  The NM chapter wants to begin some software projects
that don't yet exist, OS or otherwise, and it's unclear what I meant by starting
something up under the banner of OSGeo.

MapServer is managed by UMN, GRASS by ITC, OSSIM by RadiantBlue, but we folks
don't have an organization that would create software, manage it, release it as
open source, so our organization would be...the New Mexico chapter of OSGeo.
It's a New Mexico OSGeo project, so they direct it, and they release it,
technically OSGeo releases it.  That's all.  It's a new concept for OSGeo, but I
think it helps, and I think it will be common as time goes on.  The more formal
membership in OSGeo becomes, the more solid that link becomes.

We do all have organizations already, but nothing that would allow us to work on
something under their employ and release it as open source, and I can tell you,
if it isn't open source, it isn't going to happen at all, at least not from me.
 Few of us are professional programmers (e.g., I'm not) and can't devote much,
if any, time to these projects during work hours, and people tend not to write
software on their own time either if it's just for work.  In short, it's open
source or no source.

So who owns it?  Nowhere in the discussion of open source have I ever seen that
addressed because nobody owns it.  Anyone can take it and develop on their own
branch however they like, although that rarely happens.  Any source I write I
intend to release as GPL, free, and anyone can do what they want with it, and I
think most of New Mexican developers have something identical in mind.
Essentially, think of it like any other open source project, MapServer, etc.,
the copyright is held by whoever wrote it but as you know GPL allows for all
kinds of things that your traditional copyright disallows.  Most things are on
SourceForge, we want to host our own source because we're geeks and we thinking
setting up Subversion would be fun.

Thank you for your consideration.  Please email me or this list if you have any
other questions, and otherwise thanks again for all the encouragement.

	-Zack
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