[OSGeo-Discuss] Relationship between Telascience and the OSGeo

[Frank Warmerdam]

Landon Blake wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone could explain the nature of the relationship 
> between TelaScience and the OSGeo. Are they simply working together 
> where they have goals in common, or is there relationship more 
> substantial than that? 

Landon,

Telascience has kindly donated servers, bandwidth and support services
to OSGeo.  I'm not aware of a lot of official documents about the
relationship, it is mostly based on personal connections and the fact
that goals of telascience and OSGeo in the geo-computing space have
substantial overlap.  We are very grateful to Telascience as an organization,
and John Graham in particular for all the help we have received.

 > Does the OSGeo have its own hardware to support
> the hosting of “free” or public domain geospatial data? Will it in the 
> future?

In addition to the servers provided by Telascience we also have two rented
servers at Peer1 (svn, trac, drupal, and mailman are on one of these servers).
We are paying nearly $15K/yr for these two servers.

So far geospatial data hosting has been accomplished via the servers at
Telascience.  OSGeo has not to-date provided any resources of it's own
(ie. budgeted for) in support of hosting geodata.

Large scale geodata hosting is pretty demanding from a computational,
disk space and bandwidth point of view and it would be likely be
cost prohibitive for us to pursue it in a big way on commercially
priced servers like the ones at Peer1.

We (as a board) have had no requests from SAC or the Geodata committee
for resources for geodata hosting.

Personally, I'd be supportive of providing modest funding to purchase
additional disk, and/or server resources that could be co-located
at telascience if it would be valuable in hosting geodata hosting.

There is some question in my mind just how central the *hosting* of
free geodata is to our mission.

Best regards,
-- 
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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    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent