[OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder

[Frank Warmerdam]

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> 
>   End of life for Community Mapbuilder
> 
> We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time 
> has come for the Community Mapbuilder <http://communitymapbuilder.org/> 
> project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 
> version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned 
> enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a 
> few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user 
> queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history.

Cameron,

I think this is an excellent and professional approach - given a clear heads
up to the community on the status of things.  In fact, I've been just thrilled
by the degree of cooperation achieved between several of the web mapping client
side projects in recent years.  The experience and efforts focused on
improvement and exploitation of OpenLayers by those involved in Mapbuilder,
ka-map and other projects has helped turn OpenLayers into what I would argue
is the "best of breed" role it plays now.

As far as OSGeo process, I agree that we (perhaps within the incubation
committee?) need to work out an end-of-life/retired status for projects.
There is no problem continuing to host project resources of course, but at
some point we would want to release the project from "live status" reporting
and governance requirements and to remove it from the front page so not too
many new users are guided to it as a promoted project.

If there is no objection, I'll distribute the eol announcement via the
OSGeo announce mechanism.

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