[OSGeo-Discuss] Supporting new projects

[Cameron Shorter]

Should OSGeo be the Ubuntu of Debian of Geospatial?

Ubuntu focuses on USERS by pre-selecting and recommending best of breed 
software.
Debian and other Linux distributions focused more on DEVELOPERS by 
"letting many flowers bloom".

Consequently, Ubuntu has attracted a large user following and increased 
Open Source uptake.

OSGeo priorities should be to USERS first, developers second.

As noted by others, OSGeo human resources are limited and although it 
would be nice to help everyone we will be more effective by focusing on 
our priorities.

In practice I suggest:
1. Offer OSGeo infrastructure to new projects (low cost to us) but not 
much more until the project is stable and reaching incubation quality.

2. Encourage projects to work together and amalgamate libraries  rather 
than spawning and splitting our developers, user bases, and sponsors.
Starting a new project often has short term gains, but is detrimental to 
the community long term. Chris explained this is more detail.

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 03:08:12PM -0500, Bob Basques wrote:
>   
>> Chris,
>>
>> Ahh crap, I knew this was going to happen, the questions I mean.  :c)  I 
>> can continue with the detail offline if you like too . . .
>>     
>
> My statements, though made about your specific case, were really more of
> a general statement about any project seeking to enter into a space with
> a large following for another open source project. I feel that the
> incubation process should, as part of its process, seek to ensure that a
> project is sustainable long term -- and one of the most important
> questions in that is "Can the community behind this project sustain it?"
>
> In the case where a project has a small, but loyal, following, that may
> be true even when a larger player in the field is taking up the majority
> of the mindshare. 
>
> It can also be true where a project has a different approach to a
> problem -- FDO and OGR seem (from the outside) to be solving many of the
> same data access issues. However, after learning a bit about the FDO
> model, I can see that it has a significantly different approach than
> OGR. Clearly FDO has a significant user-base through its use in
> Autodesk's products, so I understand why having both would be beneficial
> to the community. 
>
> It's about viability. It can come in many sources -- a large, mostly
> silent community is not always better than a small, vibrant community.
> Evaluating community viability is hard -- but I think it's the purpose
> of the entire OSGeo incubation process, and being able to ask the hard
> questions of a project before it enters incubation seems like a good way
> to head off at the pass too many attmepts to reimplement the same
> things.
>
> No clue how that applies here -- just rambling, as usual :) But did want
> to toss in my $0.04 (That's $0.02 CDN these days.)
>
> Regards,
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254