[Incubator] Application OSGeo - GISCollective

[Greg Troxel]

Bogdan Szabo <contact at szabobogdan.com> writes:

> Dear OSGeo Board members,We updated our repositories to have the
> required information and we created a guide at
> <span>https://guide.giscollective.com/</span> which contains some
> tutorials and other resources for contributors.

Starting out, I don't see:

  anything about how to self-host this

  any clear statement that the entire system including the server is
  open source

In my view, open source projects that implement web servers should have
a primary path that people can self-host it, with hosted offerings
secondary.  This reads like a service more than an open-source project.
Perhaps I'm misreading, or perhaps the text is aimed at people who are
not like me :-)    That may lead you to have a web page aimed at users
and a web page aimed at server admins.

I also couldn't figure out about the overall system architecture.  I
immediately wondered if one needed mobile apps (or desktop for laptops
in the field) for data collection, or if it is all in-browser.  I see
something about a mobile app, and that raises questions of licensing
(could you get the android version into f-droid main repo, meaning no
use of google play services?).

I also don't see anything about data storage and how one can
import/export data.  I'm guessing this is all ok, but as a description
of a software project it 

Digging in, I see that one can self-host, but it's buried under
Develop/Installation.  If this is really straightforward Free Software,
how to build/install for users doesn't really belong under Develop, and
you should expect and encourage packaging systems to include it.   The
very first intro should talk about running it yourself.

This isn't really an osgeo issue, but there is talk of docker and helm,
but I don't see "instructions for just building from source and
installing normally".  That seems like a bug.

Trying to find the source code, I end up at

  https://guide.giscollective.com/en/develop/CONTRIBUTING/

and I do not see a link to the sources, or a list of the components.
Yes, I see links to your company account on gitlab and I could go find
it, but it should be explained and linked.

Finally, I am unable to understand governance.  On the main page,
there's no about, and I can't tell if this is a charity (seems clearly
not though) or a for-profit company based around a service offering of
the Free Software that's being developed.  Normal company websites give
a legal name, a mailing address, and list the officers.

Do you have any contributors from outside the company?


Assuming it's a company, it's really not clear who does and dons't have
commit rights, and how that's going to be managed.  To be a community
project, there needs to be (at least a path to) community contributors,
rather than total corporate control over contributions.

I see in contributing that parts are AGPL3 and parts are MIT.  There is
no mention of signing a CLA, which is good, but the word appears which
is bad.  You should change the text to be clear that no one is expect to
sign a CLA and that it's just inbound=outbound.  That pretty much takes
the spectre of proprietary relicsnsing off the table.

(If there is a requirement to sign a CLA that grants more rights than
the open-source license that part of the code is under, I think that's a
reason not to accept the project.  But I'm just a list member and not on
the committee.)

I hope this helps; my guess is that the developer-facing documentation
needs a bunch of work and that the underlying situation is more ok than
it seems.

Greg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/attachments/20220316/d4230648/attachment.sig>