[Incubator] Considering Portable GIS as an OSGeo community project

[Jody Garnett]

Glad to hear from you Jo!

Although the "OSGeo community" initiative was started last year, we have
not had a chance to try it out yet (perhaps due to lack of publicity). If
you are patient with us we would enjoy going through this process with you,
and revising our notes as we go.

The wiki OSGeo Community Projects
<https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Projects> page has the
following recipe:

If your project would like to join OSGeo the technology initiative asks:

   1. That your project is geospatial (or directly supports geospatial
   applications);
      - Data & doc projects would of course need an appropriate data or
      documentation license
   2. That your project is open source
      - Uses an OSI approved open source license
      - That you know where your source code came from, and that care is
      taken when accepting external contributions
   3. Participatory (accepts pull-requests)


Along with a few notes on how we can quickly check the LICENSE,
CONTRIBUTING, README files.

*autoit*

Your question about autoit is tricky, it is freely distributable - so not a
barrier to use. We are actually in a similar spot for the GeoTools and
GeoServer projects. When they were first created Java was not open source
so there were some very heated discussions with the gvSig team on if you
could ever make a free software solution using Java.

But we are an open source software foundation (not at a free software
foundation) allowing GeoTools, GeoServer .. and by extension autoit.

This question of Java still troubles us, while Java is now open source, the
image processing library that was included in Java is still only free to
distribute. This causes problems for the OSGeo Live and uDig projects.

I would be concerned though if people need to purchase autoit in order to
work on your project? There is a slight difference between being required
to purchase a tool, and optionally using a tool. For GeoTools we can "work
with" the Oracle Database (if user installs the right jars they have
downloaded from Oracle) or ArcSDE (if the user installs the right jars they
have purchased from ESRI). However if a contributor is not in possession of
these artifacts they can still work on the project as a whole.



--
Jody Garnett

On 22 August 2017 at 06:25, Jo Cook <jocook at astuntechnology.com> wrote:

> Hi Incubator List,
>
> As you may or may not know, I have been running a small project called
> Portable GIS (GIS on a USB stick for Windows) for a number of years. The
> basic premise is to provide a no-install, no-config version of many of the
> common open source GIS projects on a USB stick.
>
> Recently I built a website for the project (portablegis.xyz) and I'm
> working through the process of documenting and publishing all the
> configuration changes that need to be made to make projects portable
> (mainly batch files to be honest). This also includes the source code for
> building the menu and installer files.
>
> This is on Gitlab at https://gitlab.com/archaeogeek/portable-gis so that
> I can now start accepting contributions. Note that this repository does not
> contain the actual source code for the projects such as QGIS, it just
> contains the files that need to be adjusted to make it work portably.
>
> One of my colleagues has suggested that Portable GIS could be an OSGeo
> Community Project, so here I am, asking about it :-)
>
> My main concern is that autoit, which I used for building the menu, is
> freeware rather than opensource (see https://www.autoitscript.com/site/
> and specifically https://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/license.htm).
> My gut feeling is that this bars Portable GIS from being truly open source,
> and hence not suitable for being an OSGeo Community Project. Would that be
> correct?
>
> If this was the only bar to entry, I could certainly look at alternative
> options for building the menu.
>
> Regards
>
> Jo
>
>
>
> --
> *Jo Cook*
> t:+44 7930 524 155 <+44%207930%20524155>/twitter:@archaeogeek
>
>
> --
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>
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