[Incubator] RE: Is rasdaman suitable/ready for OSGeo incubation?

[Baumann, Peter]

Cameron,

thanks for all the effort and serious considerations put into your looking at rasdaman. I am very grateful about our discussion - among others, it has shown me that the description provided on www.rasdaman.org needs refinement and clarification. I have attempted to go into that immediately with the "feature matrix" as a start, but other places will have to undergo a check as well.

About the licensing, let me correct some false impression. The open-source rasdaman code is _not_ maintained by a company, but by a university. So the conclusion that further development of rasdaman would depend on one company is wrong in two respects:
- it is not one, but two entities supporting rasdaman
- it is not a company which is the main promoter of open source rasdaman, but a university

Hope that helps to clarify situation a bit. I feel it very fruitful that now we have come to a discussion, hope we can continue this fruitful exchange.

Regards,
Peter

________________________________________
From: Cameron Shorter [cameron.shorter at gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 12:40 AM
To: Baumann, Peter; Bruce Bannerman; OSGeo-incubator
Subject: Is rasdaman suitable/ready for OSGeo incubation?

I had the pleasure this week of meeting Peter Baumann, the primary
author behind rasdaman [1], a dual licensed raster processing
application. Along with Bruce Bannerman, we discussed rasdaman's
application for OSGeo application (initiated 18 months ago).

Understandably, Peter noted some frustration by the lack of progress
moving toward OSGeo Incubation.

Since talking to Peter, I've looked at rasdaman further, and think that
rasdaman has some great functionality, but I'm concerned that the
current dual license will hamper uptake from the open source community.

Radaman is provided via an open source community edition, and then has
extensions which are in a proprietary enterprise edition. [2] My concern
is the dual license will substantially reduce the number of developers
prepared to grow the rasdaman developer community, as there will be a
feeling that the prime developer will only maintain and advance the
enterprise version.

One of the key goals for incubation is to build a robust developer
community, with contributors from multiple organisations, and to have
the project grow sustainably. As it stands, I think that rasdaman's
licence model will make the project dependent upon the organisation
offering the enterprise software, which is counter to some of OSGeo
principles.

Peter,
I understand the challenge of finding a suitable business model and
deciding whether to go down the proprietary or open source route. Yes,
with Open Source you do get significant marketing reach and having
others share development costs. Alternatively, with proprietary, you can
charge for software. If you wish to try to achieve both, then you will
likely end up having to write most/all software yourself, which doesn't
align with OSGeo goals of building a robust developer community.
This may be a reason why people on the incubation committee have not
pushed rasdaman forward further.
If you wish to continue with OSGeo incubation, I would suggest
considering adjusting your licence model.


[1] http://rasdaman.eecs.jacobs-university.de/trac/rasdaman
[2] http://rasdaman.eecs.jacobs-university.de/trac/rasdaman/wiki/Features

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Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
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