[Incubator] Considering Portable GIS as an OSGeo community project

Wed Aug 23 13:16:46 PDT 2017

Just curious about the relationship to osgeo4w

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 1:06 PM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Jo,
>
> I'm really excited to see you pushing Portable GIS forward. I think that
> having a windows based OSGeo distribution is a great complement to
> OSGeo-Live, as OSGeo-Live is tied into (and limited to) being a linux
> distribution.
>
> I also see potential for collaboration between OSGeo-Live and Portable GIS.
> Eg, the OSGeo-Live Project Overviews could note whether the project is
> available on Portable GIS.
>
> We could also potentially align OSGeo-Live and Portable GIS release
> schedules (which would help with aligning documentation).
>
> Re packaging, have you considered building with cygwin (which is Open
> Source)?
>
> I'm happy to answer questions about license. While I'm not a lawyer, I have
> been involved in plenty of licensing selection discussions, including for
> OSGeo-Live.
>
> Re Portable GIS licensing, I assume your build tools are not embedded in the
> final Portable GIS software distribution? That would mean that the final
> software distribution does not inherit to the license of the build tools. So
> I suspect you should be ok to select what ever license you choose for the
> build tools. That is how we have approached the OSGeo-Live build scripts,
> which are LGPL. (Documentation is licensed under CC-By for Project Overviews
> and CC-By-SA for Quickstarts).
>
> Warm regards, Cameron
>
>
> On 24/8/17 1:22 am, Jo Cook wrote:
>
> Hi Jody and list,
>
> Having had a bit of a think about licensing, I had previously chosen GPLv3
> *for my components alone* and I think I'm happy with that. As far as I can
> tell, I can license my modifications alone with GPLv3 regardless of what the
> software projects themselves are. I've had a look at how OSGeo Live works,
> but that doesn't help much (https://live.osgeo.org/en/copyright.html). Is
> there anyone on the list who could help me out with this- basically to
> confirm or deny?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jo
>
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:55 AM, Jo Cook <jocook at astuntechnology.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Jody,
>>
>> That all sounds really encouraging and yes I'd be happy to go through the
>> process with you and the team. We (Astun) potentially have another project
>> that we'd like to submit for consideration too, and I'll be in touch
>> separately about that one.
>>
>> Regarding autoit, no you don't need to purchase anything to use it. Having
>> thought about this in some more detail, I think I will try to move away from
>> that dependency and try to find an open source alternative but that will
>> obviously take some time to work through, so it would be good if we could
>> start working through the process of becoming a community project while that
>> is ongoing.
>>
>> I'll make some tweaks to the repository to make sure that the various docs
>> are easy to find, and then maybe come back to you when that's ready. I want
>> to think a little about whether I'm using the most appropriate license too.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Jo
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 6:12 PM, Jody Garnett <jody.garnett at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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 page has the following recipe:
>>>
>>> If your project would like to join OSGeo the technology initiative asks:
>>>
>>> That your project is geospatial (or directly supports geospatial
>>> applications);
>>>
>>> Data & doc projects would of course need an appropriate data or
>>> documentation license
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>> 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/twitter:@archaeogeek
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Astun Technology Ltd, The Coach House, 17 West Street, Epsom, Surrey,
>>>> KT18 7RL, UK
>>>> t:+44 1372 744 009 w: astuntechnology.com twitter:@astuntech
>>>>
>>>> iShare - enterprise geographic intelligence platform
>>>> GeoServer, PostGIS and QGIS training
>>>> Helpdesk and customer portal
>>>>
>>>> Company registration no. 5410695. Registered in England and Wales.
>>>> Registered office: 120 Manor Green Road, Epsom, Surrey, KT19 8LN VAT no.
>>>> 864201149.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jo Cook
>> t:+44 7930 524 155/twitter:@archaeogeek
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jo Cook
> t:+44 7930 524 155/twitter:@archaeogeek
>
>
> --
> Astun Technology Ltd, The Coach House, 17 West Street, Epsom, Surrey, KT18
> 7RL, UK
> t:+44 1372 744 009 w: astuntechnology.com twitter:@astuntech
>
> iShare - enterprise geographic intelligence platform
> GeoServer, PostGIS and QGIS training
> Helpdesk and customer portal
>
> Company registration no. 5410695. Registered in England and Wales.
> Registered office: 120 Manor Green Road, Epsom, Surrey, KT19 8LN VAT no.
> 864201149.
>
>
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>
>
> --
> Cameron Shorter
> M +61 419 142 254
>
>
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