[Incubator] Recommend Graduation of Rasdaman from OSGeo Incubation

[Bruce Bannerman]

Project:                    Rasdaman

Project Contact:       Peter Baumann

Project Mentor:        Bruce Bannerman


Recommendation:   Rasdaman to Graduate from OSGeo Incubation


Incubation Checklist:  http://rasdaman.org/wiki/OSGeoIncubationChecklist




Comments:

I have been monitoring and participating in the Rasdaman Community
developer and user email lists for over four years. I plan to continue to
participate within the community.

It has been pleasing to see how the community has evolved over this time to
develop effective, open and robust processes.

I recommend to other FOSS4G communities to review what has been done, as
you may well find that Rasdaman offers a compelling solution for the
management of multi-dimensional array or gridded data that your project may
be able to capitalise on.

A summary of community activity may be found at:
https://www.openhub.net/p/rasdaman

Key project members are active within both OSGeo and the OGC.

Within the OGC they have successfully guided a range of standards to
support mutltidimensional array (gridded) data which have culminated
(currently) in Web Coverage Service version 2.0 and a suite of extensions,
see: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs

The project's principal, Professor Peter Baumann was also recently awarded
OGC's prestigious Kenneth D Gardels award for his contributions to OGC.



After having participated within the community for four years and having
reviewed their OSGeo Project Graduation Checklist, I believe that Rasdaman
Community have fulfilled the requirements of OSGeo Incubation and are
eligible to graduate as an OSGeo Project.


The only reservation that I have is over the dual licensing model that is
used by the sponsoring company, Rasdaman GmbH. See:
http://www.rasdaman.com/Product/commercial+free.php



There are two versions: Community (GPL and LGPL) and Enterprise (free from
GPL constraints).

The main difference between the two versions is summarised at:
http://www.rasdaman.org/wiki/Features



This dual licensing may create a problem for the Rasdaman Community in the
future should Rasdaman GmbH decide to sell its stake in the Rasdaman
Enterprise version of the software. We have already seen a similar
situation arise after the sale of MySQL which was similarly licensed.

However as the community edition of the software is released under open
source licenses, I expect that the main impact would be to the continuity
of the Rasdaman Community in its current form. In the event of a sale, we
may see the software forked, as happened with MySQL.

For consideration and vote.

Bruce
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