[GRASS5] GRASS Project Steering Committee and more

[Brad Douglas]

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 18:15 +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
Markus,

Comments are inline:

> A couple of things will have to be sorted out in the
> coming months to make GRASS's membership possible (below
> list is inspired by Frank's mail to the GRASS project):
> 
> o We will need to form a "GRASS Project Steering Committee"
>   (PSC). Foundation projects need a formalized management
>   which may be desired in any case. I would be glad to 
>   receive suggestions of names for this committee. For
>   inspiration, please look at the MapServer Technical
>   Steering Committee as described here:
> 
>     http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1

I would like to make the following nominations to the GRASS PSC:

- Glynn Clements for his vast knowledge of standards, practices and
compatibility.
- Radim Blazek for his extensive GRASS work including vector and DBMS
support.
- Hamish Bowman for documentation, integration, and various modules.
- Paul Kelly for PROJ and platform support.
- Markus Neteler for obvious. :-)

I apologize if I missed anyone or misrepresented anyone's work.

> 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 license of GRASS (GPL) and that they have 
>    the right to submit the code (they wrote it, it is not
>    patented, have permission from their employer, etc).

I like this.  It'll provide a degree of IP protection for the project.

> o We will have to review the existing code base (which is
>    huge - more than 500000 lines of source code in GRASS 6).
>    Luckily a major code review was already done for GRASS 5.
>    Also the "Debianization" process was performed for GRASS
>    5 and GRASS 6.

Can this affect what libraries we're "allowed" to link against or does
it apply only to GRASS code?

> o It is suggested to move the support infrastructure for GRASS
>    to new foundation systems. Stuff like CVS (maybe SVN then),
>    and bugtracker and mailing lists. The web site will also
>    likely appear under a foundation subdomain (ie. grass.osgeo.org)
>    with hopefully the known mirror site structure as before
>    with grass.itc.it, grass.ibiblio.org etc as principal mirror
>    sites. If so, the web site will be migrated into a contents
>    management system (CMS) in a harmonized "foundation style".
>    A CMS will hopefully solve the problem to get more people
>    involved in the Web site contents management.
> 
> o We hope to establish options to enable sponorship for the
>    foundation - be as direct funding or for selected foundation
>    projects. Details have to be worked out. My suggestion is to 
>    create national tax-exempt organizations (such as the
>    German GRASS Anwender-Vereinigung e.V. which already exists)
>    which may offer to receive donations.

My only concern is that the foundation could interfere with developer
commits.  OTOH, the foundation could speed development by tackling some
of the longstanding headaches that need to be hashed out.

> o For now we should think about nominating people with
>    recognized contribution to the GRASS project, to
>    free data, to whatever deems significant. A small paragraph
>    describing why the candidate is proposed as member to
>    the foundation is needed as well. This will be announced
>    more formally soon. Please see ongoing discussions here:
>    http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Let me know if I should formalize and expand my above nominations.