[OSGeo-Discuss] Thematic Mapping Engine as Open Source?

[Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas]

2008/6/24 Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at crschmidt.net>:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 02:01:17PM +0200, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>> Just as a side note: Google has been overly submissive to US Export
>> Regulations and rejects requests from IPs that can be traced to a location
>> within an country that falls under their export ban list. Unfortunately the
>> same applies to SourceForge.
>> Thus publishing your project through Google Code or SourceForge effectively
>> prevents interested folks from joining the project if they are citizen of a
>> nation that falls under the US Export Regulations. This also applies to
>> people only visiting such countries.
>
> Is there some other easy option here? Hosting your own is fscking
> painful, OSGeo doesn't offer hosting for small projects like this, and I
> expect anyone else who is big enough to make solving this problem easy
> likely isn't in a position to be much more open/unrestricted, because
> they're governed by the same laws.
>
> It seems to me like an option is just to make the code available on
> google code, and also republish it in another easily-googled place.
> Then, if it becomes an issue that is blocking contributors, put the
> effort into doing something about it -- setting up an SVN mirror, or
> something similar, to allow those users to contribute.
>
> In general, OpenLayers has not seen major contributions from
> technology export-embargoed countries. (Our server doesn't have
> technical restrictions blocking export to these countries.) Although it
> is a concern -- and certainly, it's unfortunate because it is a vicious
> cycle where contributors are typically blocked, so they don't even
> bother kind of thing -- I think that the relative importance of this
> to, say,  a website being down an hour a week or something like that is
> relatively low (and if you're maintaining it yourself, you'll always
> have downtime when things break).
>
> Regards,

I'm right now moving from GoogleCode (the export laws, you know) to
JavaHispano[0] with some problems but enough by far for my
necessities.

There is also gna![1], and SEXTANTE[2] has moved to OSOR[3] a new
forge for european public administration free software projects.

I tested some time ago the knowledgeforge[4] but it didn't worked really well :S

Cheers

[0]http://javahispano.net
[1]https://gna.org/
[2]http://sextantegis.com/en/index.htm
[3]https://forge.osor.eu/projects/sextante/
[4]http://www.knowledgeforge.net/

-- 
Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas
Ingeniero en Geodesia y Cartografía
http://www.geomaticblog.net
http://www.prodevelop.es