[Incubator] Considering Portable GIS as an OSGeo community project

Wed Aug 23 13:41:40 PDT 2017

Thanks Jo:

If I could ask you to consider a CONTRIBUTING.txt or CONTRIBUTING.md file
we should be good to go.

To keep this procedure light I think we can do what we are doing now,
discuss on the email list here, help a project get to the point where an
incubation committee member is comfortable making a motion.

Our motions happen via email, we hold them open for two weeks (since some
of our contributors only check on in on the weekend).

I am glad to see Astun taking advantage of the new website. As discussed
with Ian and Steven there is no requirement to join the community project
program to be listed on the new website - but if you do join we should be
able to offer an extra publicity bump and an on ramp for greater OSGeo
interaction / collaboration.

Thanks for joining the experiment.

--
Jody Garnett

On 23 August 2017 at 00:55, 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
>> <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
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Astun Technology Ltd, The Coach House, 17 West Street, Epsom, Surrey,
>>> KT18 7RL, UK
>>> t:+44 1372 744 009 <+44%201372%20744009> w: astuntechnology.com twitter:
>>> @astuntech <https://twitter.com/astuntech>
>>>
>>> iShare - enterprise geographic intelligence platform
>>> <https://astuntechnology.com/ishare/>
>>> GeoServer, PostGIS and QGIS training
>>> <https://astuntechnology.com/services/#training>
>>> Helpdesk and customer portal
>>> <http://support.astuntechnology.com/support/login>
>>>
>>> Company registration no. 5410695. Registered in England and Wales.
>>> Registered office: 120 Manor Green Road, Epsom, Surrey, KT19 8LN VAT no.
>>> 864201149.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Incubator mailing list
>>> Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> *Jo Cook*
> t:+44 7930 524 155 <+44%207930%20524155>/twitter:@archaeogeek
>
>
> --
> Astun Technology Ltd, The Coach House, 17 West Street, Epsom, Surrey, KT18
> 7RL, UK
> t:+44 1372 744 009 <+44%201372%20744009> w: astuntechnology.com twitter:
> @astuntech <https://twitter.com/astuntech>
>
> iShare - enterprise geographic intelligence platform
> <https://astuntechnology.com/ishare/>
> GeoServer, PostGIS and QGIS training
> <https://astuntechnology.com/services/#training>
> Helpdesk and customer portal
> <http://support.astuntechnology.com/support/login>
>
> 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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