[Gdal-dev] GDAL Joining Open Source Geospatial Foundation

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I attended the lauch meeting for the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation in Chicago on saturday.  It went very well, and
I have taken the step of committing the GDAL/OGR project
to joining as one of the initial projects.   I was also elected to
the interim board of directors.

I am hoping we will have information up in the not too distant
future describing the foundation but it will take a while to hammer
out all the details.

In the coming months there are a few things that will be
done to make GDAL's membership a reality:

 o We will need to form a "GDAL Project Steering Committee"
    or something similar.   Foundation projects cannot be a
    dictatorship as GDAL is currently.  So I will be approaching
    a few major folks to join such a committee.  I hope in the
    future it will grow.  It will presumably be modelled to some
    extent on the MapServer Technical Steering Committee
    described in:

    http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1

 o One benefit of the foundation is some degree of legal
    support and protection for the project.  The flip side of that
    is that the foundation needs to ensure some degree of
    rigor and process in how code comes into the project.  One
    part of that is getting committers to sign a legal agreement
    indicating that they agree that changes they commit will
    be under the GDAL/OGR license (MIT/X) and that they
    have the right to submit the code (they wrote it, have
    permission from their employer, etc).

 o Some degree of "vetting" of existing code will need to be
    done so we have assurance it is unencumbered.  Essentially
    the retroactive part of the previous step.

 o At some point some of the support infrastructure for GDAL
    is likely to move to foundation systems.  Stuff like CVS,
    and Bugzilla for instance.  The web site wll also likely appear
    under a foundation subsite (ie. gdal.osgeo.org) though I
    will also retain the current www.gdal.ogr address.  The
    web site will also be adapted to some degree to fit into
    the foundation "style".

 o Once details are worked out, I will also start making the
    rounds of corporate users of GDAL trying to drum up
    sponorships for the foundation.  The idea I floated with
    reasonable success at the formation meeting was that
    foundation sponsor ships be able to name project(s) that
    they want to support and that the majority of their
    sponsorship money would be made directly available to
    that project for support.  My idea being this would provide
    a means to provide some funding for nitty gritty ongoing
    maintenance.

I will provide more details as things progress, and I welcome
feedback.

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