[GRASS-PSC] Open issues regarding OSGeo Incubation

[Helena Mitasova]

Paul Kelly wrote:
> 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.
I am wondering whether a good identification of this particular GRASS 
project would be that
it is an OSGEO project: so the text could say GRASS, an OSGEO project 
(or official OSGEO project).
I think if any other GRASS project would want to get accepted as OSGEO 
project,
the condition would certainly be to resolve the name conflict so there 
won't be two GRASS projects
recognized as OSGEO projects.
Markus what do you think? We can still include your institution in the 
definition but linking the project
definition to OSGEO may help to identify it more strictly.

Helena


>
> 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
>
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