[Incubator] New Application: GeoToolkit

Jody Garnett jody.garnett at gmail.com
Sat May 23 00:29:20 EDT 2009


Hi Daniel:

I am going to put out a formal post up shortly. We had ask Martin to
step down last month which was very dissappointing. After his
contributions over the years we thought it good to allow him to step
down gracefully.

Larger picture we have had a bit of trouble working with his current
company. We have development procedures to keep the project running in
an even handed way; and it simply was not working out in this case.

A couple specific things that got me:
- strategic decisions that should be made as a community were being
made behind closed doors
- in each case the community tried to be receptive; since we are set
up for collaboration
- A specific technological direction - the use  of JaxB an xml parsing
technology - we were unable to accept as it could not be used with
Java 5 (representing our current installation base)
- in ability to accept patches; we had a $60k referencing patch that
sat in the code base for 3 years; which we now see integrated on this
fork

I am not sure what else is useful to say; the GeoTools project is
open; has published procedures; and as a project management committee
member it was Martin's responsibility to communicate on behalf of his
users and organization. I enjoy a strong working relationship with
Martin and really enjoy the chances we have to work together. I feel
this one is as much about control; and the requirement to answer to
community.

We have had a recent IRC discussion on this one
(http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/2009/05/20/Breakout+IRC+Meeting)
and have been fielding private emails from our user community (hense
the need for a public announcement). Personally I am more worried
about the GeoAPI project then either of GeoTools or GeoToolkit.

Jody

>> Folks,
>>
>> A couple weeks ago we received another application for incubation from the
>> GeoToolkit project. GeoToolkit is a fork of GeoTools.
>>
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geotoolkit_Incubation_Application
>>
>
> Um... a fork of an existing OSGeo project applying for graduation. Not sure
> what to think about that. Forks are part of our reality and I have no
> problem with that, but I'm not sure that OSGeo can stand behind two forks of
> the same project.
>
> The history page is an interesting read, but I still don't get a clear idea
> of what's happening exactly and what to think about both GeoToolkit vs
> GeoTools:
>
> http://www.geotoolkit.org/history.html
>
> It would perhaps be interesting to hear what the GeoTools PMC members have
> to say about this fork... hear their side of the story.
>
> Daniel
> --
> Daniel Morissette
> http://www.mapgears.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Incubator mailing list
> Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator


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