[Incubator] Initiating the process for R-Spatial to become an OSGeo community project

Thu Jul 1 13:28:39 PDT 2021

Dear Jody, thanks for your efforts and positive response!

I'll try to answer your questions:

 > Q: What is the project license for sf? Can you clearly indicate it in 
a LICENSE.md file? Or would that mess up your build?

The licence is MIT or GPL-2; I guess that that effectively means MIT, 
but trying to express appreciation when others share modifications 
they'd redistribute.

It wouldn't be a problem to add LICENSE.md, I didn't do that because the 
authoritative place for released versions is CRAN, which has a landing 
page for each CRAN package; the one for sf is: 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sf/index.html where you can see 
that the licenses are listed with to their corresponding texts. If I 
would add a LICENSE.md, it duplicates and could be one more source for 
confusion. This is also the reason we don't do github tags or releases, 
as CRAN archives all releases; look for "Old sources", which in this 
case points to all CRAN releases of sf: 
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sf/

For most R developers, github is a convenience, but CRAN is the place 
where we release, and where information is complete.

 > Q: What is your osgeo id? So you can be setup with website access to 
make a project page

My osgeo ID is edzer

Many regards,
-- 
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics
Heisenbergstrasse 2, 48151 Muenster, Germany
Phone: +49 251 8333081

Previous message:

First up it is great to see such a strong R community, I have even seen
presentations on the *sf* in my local university down "geogeeks" meetup
(back when we could you know meet up).

I was checking in to see if you had made any progress towards an osgeo
project page, and I did not see anything yet...

Checking your github repositories such as https://github.com/r-spatial/sf

1 Be geospatial
- README.md clearly spatial topic :)

2. Have a free license or open source license
- sf LICENSE <-- does not actually list an open source license (so you
would trick github license detection)
- mapview was clearly GPL
- Searching the codebase shows
https://github.com/r-spatial/sf/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L50 indicating some
combination of MIT and GPL (what is your thought here?)

3. Welcome participation and new contributors.
- Well I have personally experienced your enthusiastic community, ... but
this is a bit more focused on having a policy for things like pull requests.
- Massive number of closed pull requests from a wide range of contributors
- For sf I did not find a CONTRIBUTING.md file (shown to folks making a
pull request) but the README has heading about contributing which is great

So this looks okay, but I have questions:

Q: What is the project license for sf? Can you clearly indicate it in a
LICENSE.md file? Or would that mess up your build?
Q: What is your osgeo id? So you can be setup with website access to make a
project page

--
Jody Garnett

On Mon, 22 Feb 2021 at 06:21, Robin Lovelace <rob00x at gmail.com> wrote:

 > We would like to apply, as the 'R-Spatial' community, to become an OSGeo
 > affiliated organisation.
 >
 > We are a diverse group with a shared interest in developing free and open
 > tools for the reproducible analysis of geographic data. R is a 
popular and
 > rapidly growing language for statistical computing and 'data science'. It
 > is already part of the OSGeo ecosystem: the OSGeo Live distribution ships
 > with R <https://github.com/OSGeo/OSGeoLive/blob/master/bin/install_R.sh>
 > and R integrates with established OSGeo projects such as GRASS GIS
 > <https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/R_statistics>, SAGA
 > <https://cran.r-project.org/package=RSAGA> and QGIS
 > <https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/>. R tutorials (which would benefit
 > from being updated) are listed on the tutorials listed on OSGeo's old
 > website <http://old.www.osgeo.org/educational_content>. We would like to
 > update existing content and create new OSGeo-affiliated tutorials for 
using
 > R-Spatial software. Many R-Spatial projects have support from the R
 > Consortium <https://www.r-consortium.org/>, opening the possibility of
 > stronger links between R and OSGeo at an organisational level.
 >
 > After a discussion on our GitHub Organisation at github.com/r-spatial, it
 > is clear that closer links could be mutually beneficial. Collaboration is
 > at the heart of open source software and the R community has a long
 > history. The history of R-GRASS GIS bridges, for example, covers more 
than 20
 > years <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0098-3004(00)00057-1> and goes in both
 > directions. R interfaces enable a wide range of people to access
 > OSGeo-supported software from a reproducible command-line interface.
 >
 > Continued development and innovation in R-OSGeo links are illustrated the
 > qgisprocess <https://github.com/paleolimbot/qgisprocess> package, which
 > motivated positive changes in the QGIS source code (see
 > github.com/paleolimbot/qgisprocess/issues/21). The R-Spatial community
 > relies on the OSGeo projects GDAL, PROJ and GEOS for data access and
 > geographic operations. Core R-Spatial packages sf, raster and terra use
 > bindings to the libraries for much of the heavy lifting and many 
thousands
 > of people using R for spatial research (often without knowing) run OSGeo
 > support code every day. We would like to support the ongoing work of 
these
 > vital components of the wider community that is represented by the
 > OSGeo-affiliated conference series FOSS4G. We also anticipate 
benefits from
 > being part of the wider OSGeo community and would like to be more active
 > members of the wider movement advocating free and open source 
software for
 > geospatial.
 >
 > 'R-Spatial' can be loosely defined as the ecosystem of code, projects and
 > people using R for working with and adding value to spatial data. A
 > manifestation of the wider R-Spatial community is the friendly, 
vibrant and
 > diverse range of voices using the #rspatial
 > <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rspatial> tag on Twitter. For the
 > purposes of OSGeo supported *software* projects however, we define
 > R-Spatial as the packages found at https://github.com/r-spatial/ (which
 > includes sf, stars, mapview, gstat, spdep and many other popular packages
 > for working with spatial data) and https://github.com/rspatial/ (which
 > includes packages raster and terra). A (possibly incomplete) list with R
 > packages that directly link to OSGEO libraries is found here
 > 
<https://github.com/r-spatial/discuss/wiki/R-packages-that-use-the-OSGEO-stack-in-System-Requirements:>.
 > Thousands of R packages depend on these packages one way or another.
 >
 > We would like to initiate the process needed for R-Spatial to eventually
 > become an OSGeo community project, by achieving the first two of the 
three
 > steps as outlined on the Incubation Committee web page
 > 
<https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Incubation_Committee#Step_1:_Add_OSGeo_Website_Project_Page>
 > :
 >
 >    - We would like to create an OSGeo web page with information about key
 >    packages in the 'R-spatial stack', including how they relate to OSGeo
 >    projects
 >    - We would like to become an OSGeo Community Project
 > 
<https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Incubation_Committee#Step_2:_Join_Community_Projects_Program>
 >
 > All the best,
 >
 > R-Spatial developers and contributors, including: Robin Lovelace, Roger
 > Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Tim Appelhans, Robert Hijmans, Jakub Nowosad, Nick
 > Bearman, Emmanuel Blondel, Andy Teucher, Marynia Kolak, Timothée Giraud,
 > Ahmadou Dicko, Andrea Gilardi, Lorena Abad, Martijn Tennekes
 > _______________________________________________
 > Incubator mailing list
 > Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
 > https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator
 >