[GRASS-PSC] Open issues regarding OSGeo Incubation

[Paul Kelly]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, Markus Neteler wrote:

> "ITC" no longer exists, it is the foundation now. IRST was one of three
> institutes of ITC (naturally called "center" to increase confusion :-).
> I assume that IRST remains, maybe as FBK-irst or so. To be decided
> by the politicians.
>
> In summary: I agree that headquarted isn't really needed in the
> general summary.

OK: coming back to this (I feel the discussion about trademarks, while 
important, is getting a little off the point). What I had in mind with 
describing "our" GRASS in detail (the headquartered... bit) was thinking 
about all the other versions of GRASS there exist in the wild (public 
domain GRASS, Blackland GRASS, JGrass etc.) and making it clear that the 
GRASS PSC is not claiming any kind of authority over them. I.e. I was 
concerned more that other versions of GRASS could potentially object to 
the PSC documents defining GRASS in very vague terms. I wasn't really 
worried about other people using the name GRASS - I don't think that's a 
big issue. Especially considering as the public domain GRASS was also 
called GRASS, I think any project based on that codebase has as much a 
right to use the name as "our" GRASS community. As long as we keep 
improving and updating GRASS and making it the GRASS version of choice to 
use, then we have little to worry about from trademark infringement. TBH I 
don't think there's much we can do about it really even if we wanted to.

So, the issue remains: I do feel it's very important that we put something 
in the PSC document to indicate that what the document describes is "our" 
GRASS community, i.e. code hosted on the CVS at Intevation, mailing lists 
hosted at Markus' institution, postal contact address there etc. If saying 
"headquartered at..." is not the best way to indicate this, we need a 
viable alternative IMHO.

For information: a HTML version of the proposed document is available at:
http://mpa.itc.it/markus/grass63progman/rfc/rfc1_psc.html
And also the new voting procedures which is important too:
http://mpa.itc.it/markus/grass63progman/rfc/rfc3_psc.html

Still plenty of time for more discussion.

Paul