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

Mon Jul 5 01:50:28 PDT 2021

Hi Jody,

Thanks for the response and apologies for the slow response.

It's great to see there is appetite and that we mostly fit the criteria.
Some of this discussion can happen in the FOSS4G panel here:
https://callforpapers.2021.foss4g.org/foss4g2021/talk/VYRV77/

See below for detailed comments on the sf package from Edzer, I'm not sure
if these were distributed to the list.

Can provide more detailed replies soon on the ecosystem of R-Spatial that
is applying in the next month or so, any further follow-up questions in the
meantime welcome.

Message from Edzer:

*From:* Edzer Pebesma <edzer.pebesma at uni-muenster.de>
*Sent:* 01 July 2021 21:28
*To:* incubator at lists.osgeo.org <incubator at lists.osgeo.org>
*Cc:* Robin Lovelace <R.Lovelace at leeds.ac.uk>; Roger.Bivand at nhh.no <
Roger.Bivand at nhh.no>
*Subject:* Re: [Incubator] Initiating the process for R-Spatial to become
an OSGeo community project

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

On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 1:00 AM Jody Garnett <jody.garnett at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>
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