[Incubator] MapFish Incubation

[Eric Lemoine]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Gary Sherman <gsherman at mrcc.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:46 PM, Daniel Morissette
> <dmorissette at mapgears.com> wrote:
>> Hi Gary, and MapFish PSC,
>>
>
>> - Gary: as the mentor, could you please comment on whether the project has
>> an open and active users and developers community? I believe it does and the
>> MapFish incubation status page says so, but I'd like to hear the opinion of
>> an observer not on the project that has been following them for several
>> months. More specifically, does the developer community work in an open
>> (i.e. on public lists, not behind closed doors) and healthy way, open to
>> input, new members and reaching consensus on decisions?
>>
>
> It seems that the community is open and the community is active,
> although at a lower level than some projects as Frank observed in this
> thread. The developer community is open and as far as I can tell, does
> not operate behind close doors. As an example, requests for action to
> the PSC use the -Dev mailing list. From what I have seen, the
> community is certainly open to new contributors.

Hi

Thank you all for helping us complete the incubation process.

I'd first like to confirm what Gary's saying: the MapFish community is
open - we discuss things publicly, and we welcome new contributions
and contributors. We recently granted commit access to Tim-Hinnerk
Heuer (Landcare Research). As stated in [1] anyone willing to get
commit access can request it to the MapFish PSC.

Now here are answers to questions we've received in this thread:

1) Documentation License

The MapFish documentation is available at
<http://www.mapfish.org/doc/index.html>.

Some documents are already covered by Creative Common License
Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic. See [2] for an example.

I just sent an email to the dev at mapfish.org mailing requesting that we
extend the usage of this license for all MapFish documents available
in the MapFish website. See [3]. (I'm fairly confident this will be
quickly adopted.)

2) Code Licensing

Daniel mentioned that it is unfortunate that we manage code under
three licenses. We agree this can confusing. Here's the rational
behind it: we've been favoring adopting the licenses of the
communities we live in. For example, the MapFish Python framework is
based on Pylons; Pylons is distributed under BSD, so we adopted the
same license. I think this is pretty conventional, and wise.

3) Code Provenance

We had "code inspired by" statements in the the code provenance
spreadsheet. We replaced them by "code copied from" statements, and
clearly specified the licenses of the copied code.

Jody said he didn't know the ZPL license. ZPL is the Zope Public
License [4], it is primarily used for Zope projects. This is a
permissive license close to BSD. Almost every Python project includes
ZPL code, as this is required to install the project with
"setuptools", the De Facto standard for distributing and installing
Python projects.

We had the Groovy scripts under Creative Common. For consistency we
re-licensed them to GPL [5], as the rest of the Print code.

Images included in our code base either are public icons, taken from
http://www.famfamfam.com/, or were created by us.

Daniel reported that ./print/print-standalone.jar is listed as being
licensed under BSD, instead of GPL. This was a bug. It is now
corrected.

4) The mapfish.org website

Frank and Daniel reported that the "Community" aspects of the project
weren't visible on mapfish.org. We addressed this by adding a
"Community" section to the front page of mapfish.org. This section
provides direct accesses to the main community-related information,
and a link to the MapFish Wiki/Trac, indicating that more information
is available there.

In the menu bar of mapfish.org we changed the "Wiki" link to
"Wiki/Trac", again to help users find where to report issues, etc.

We indeed have no "download" link in mapfish.org. This is because
downloading MapFish will get people nowhere. People who want to use
MapFish should follow the "installation" instructions, to which a link
is provided in the menu bar.

5) Mailing lists

Frank is concerned with the fact that Camptocamp hosts and manages the
MapFish mailing lists, and thinks it makes sense to bind relatively
quiet lists to OSGeo systems. We fully agree with that, and we're
happy to move the MapFish lists to OSGeo systems. We're just hoping
that this won't block the graduation process, and are proposing to
begin the migration ASAP.



We're hoping this answers questions and concerns. We're happy to
answer new questions, if any.

Thank you.



[1] <https://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/wiki/Community/HowToContribute>
[2] <http://www.mapfish.org/doc/tutorials/python-workshop/en/index.html>
[3] <http://lists.mapfish.org/pipermail/dev/2011-August/000826.html>
[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zope_Public_License>
[5] <http://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/changeset/3840/print/trunk>

-- 
Eric Lemoine

Camptocamp France SAS
Savoie Technolac, BP 352
73377 Le Bourget du Lac, Cedex

Tel : 00 33 4 79 44 44 96
Mail : eric.lemoine at camptocamp.com
http://www.camptocamp.com