[Incubator] Re: STARSpan Incubation

[Cameron Shorter]

Mirroring Frank's comments,
While STARSpan sounds like a useful package, I'm concerned its community 
might not be large enough to sustain it.

In particular, the incubation process takes a lot of effort, taking 
projects 6 to 18 months to complete. And that is with a strong community.

I suggest looking at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Labs
Or consider joining as a sub-project of GRASS.


Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
> 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
>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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