[Incubator] Re: STARSpan Incubation

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Frank:

Great to hear we are in the queue -- let me respond to the questions:

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Jonathan,
> 
> Thank you for your submission of STARSpan for incubation as an OSGeo 
> project.
> I have taken the liberty of slightly reformatting your application:
> 
>   http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/282

Thanks -- I typed up the app. in word then copied/pasted into the trac 
-- looks like the formatting got a bit messed up.


> I would appreciate it if you could subscribe to the OSGeo Incubator mailing
> list in order to respond to questions about the STARSpan application.
> 
>   http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator

Done.

> I think that STARSpan could be a good addition to the collection of OSGeo
> projects.  A few questions we may want to review during while considering
> the project for incubation or during incubation are:
> 
> 1) Is the project currently large enough to operate as an OSGeo project 
> with
>    the mechanisms this implies, and to sustain itself?
> 
>    We usually look for a project to have enough participation from the user
>    and developer communities to establish a reasonably diverse project
>    steering committee.  Likewise, having the primary developer moving on 
> leaves
>    a question of whether there is enough development experience and 
> interest
>    left to sustain the project.

A good question -- Carlos (cc'ed) has offered to dedicate some time to 
bug fixes and helping others get up to speed (me included) -- one of 
things we'd like to try to get is a new programmer from the OSGeo 
community who might be interested in the project.  I've been meaning to 
learn C++, so I'll probably be starting to learn to edit the code 
myself.  My feeling is that the software is fairly mature in terms of 
functionality -- I think some remaining major "upgrades" are probably 
expanding the types of output (e.g. stdout, appending to vector DB, etc).

> 2) During incubation we could investigate whether the BSD license is the
>    credit requiring license and whether that is ok.  It would also be 
> desirable
>    to have some statement by a authorized representative (possibly this 
> would
>    be you) that it is supportive of the migration to OSGeo.  This doesn't
>    mean there has to be a copyright assignment, but we would like to have
>    the cooperation of the primary copyright holder.

I'm in contact with our campus copyright personnel -- I expect we won't 
have any problems with the licensing -- our campus produces open source 
software all the time...

> 3) I am wondering about integration with other projects, and whether it 
> would
>    possibly make sense for STARSpan to become in some sense associated with
>    an existing project (like GRASS).

We definitely would like it wrapped into other open source projects-- 
the two most obvious would be GRASS GIS and R (since much of the utility 
of the ASCII output is parsing the data to an external stats package). 
Ideally, we'd like to have it remain fundamentally standalone with 
application wrappers, rather than having it start down the path of a 
single-app plugin.  This shouldn't be too much of a problem, I don't 
think.  That would divide the development into the starspan core code, 
and application wrappers as various user's decide it is a good idea to 
develop.

> I hope to hold an Incubator meeting in the coming few weeks to consider 
> this
> and the other pending incubation applications.  The meeting will be 
> announced
> on the incubator list, and I would appreciate your attending (by IRC).
> 
> Don't hesitate to contact me if you have further questions about the 
> process.
> 
> Best regards,

Sounds good!  Incidentally, Dylan Beaudette was the one who recommended 
OSGeo as a good community to try to expand interest and help continue 
development of our software.

--j

-- 

Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS)
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
The Barn, Room 250N
Davis, CA 95616
Cell: 415-794-5043
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307