[OSGeo-Discuss] Future perspectives for OSGeo

[Andrew Ross]

Thank you for starting this discussion Arnulf.

I suspect there are going to be some people here that are extremely
familiar with Eclipse, and others not at all. For this reason I felt it
would be a good idea to share a little information.

Eclipse is an ecosystem of organizations and open source technology
projects. The organizations and projects @ Eclipse have symbiotic
relationships creating an elegant balance which benefits both. There are
currently over two hundred projects at Eclipse and a similar number of
member organizations. The organizations are all sorts of shapes and sizes.
There's roughly a thousand committers from all around the world.

There are many things that make this ecosystem interesting. One especially
notable one is seeing organizations collaborate around open source projects
and compete in the marketplace. The governance model at Eclipse is designed
to create a level playing field between large & small and has done so
successfully for a number of years now. The value for members has meant
valuable support for projects which is great.

There foundation has 15 staff
members<http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/staff.php>including
myself covering accounting, legal, IT, marketing, business
development, event planning, release engineering, administrative support
for projects, and many other functions. This doesn't mean volunteers don't
have a significant role and influence. Many great initiatives such as our
push to git, gerrit, hudson, etc. have been driven by the community and
then maintained as well managed services by staff.

There's a lot of Java projects at Eclipse given the history of how it got
started. In more recent times projects have joined/are joining implemented
in all sorts of languages and aimed at a variety of different industries.
The Orion <http://www.eclipse.org/orion/> web IDE, based on Javascript is a
really cool example. For what it's worth, the Eclipse Foundation is vendor
neutral and welcoming to projects implemented in any language, just like
OSGeo, which is what you'd expect.

Trying not to overload with too much information, the Location industry
working group <http://wiki.eclipse.org/Location> is forming and closely
related to this. It has some great people & organizations involved already
if you'd like to check it out. Many of us are involved with both OSGeo &
the industry working group and want to see good things happen. It's early
enough and the model is such that those that are interested can get
involved and help shape it.

Best regards,

Andrew
(andrew dot ross at eclipse dot org <= my other email)


On 2 May 2012 13:04, Arnulf Christl (OSGeo) <arnulf at osgeo.org> wrote:

> Folks,
> the OSGeo board of directors has been working hard on finding ways
> forward in those areas where we do not perform well. These are
> especially on the business side of things. Our annual revenue has come
> down considerably in the last years and we seem to lack high level
> contacts to global players. Without the single sponsor Autodesk we
> honestly wouldn't be where we are now but they have considerably reduced
> their focused on geospatial.
>
> We see new opportunities by starting joint activities with the Eclipse
> foundation - which is in the process of spawning activities explicitly
> focused on geospatial. They have lots of high level contacts but lack a
> noteworthy community. This is where we in turn did exceptionally well,
> we are perceived as *the* global voice for open source geospatial.
>
> In between the community and business work (if we take them as extremes)
> is a long range of things we did well and not so well and obviously
> everybody will have their own opinion. If you are interested in learning
> more about what the board is thinking and want to share your ideas I
> suggest you subscribe to the board list and become active there. (Please
> refrain from telling us "you must be doing this and that" but reckon
> that whatever will happen does so because you also commit to actually
> doing it).
>
> Once we come to a more coherent point of view we will again share it
> with this discussion list but for now would like to keep it at the
> "strategically interested" level of things, just as open as all in OSGeo
> - but not cluttering the Discuss list.
>
> The board will start to post a few threads in the next days summarizing
> the thoughts shared so far.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Arnulf
>
> --
> The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
> Arnulf Christl, President
> http://www.osgeo.org
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
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