Proposal to find an alternative to Collabnet

[Cameron Shorter]

Steve Lime who is mentoring Mapbuilder has pointed out that Mapbuilder 
infrustructure is spread out across multiple web sites and would look 
much better if we were to consolidate in one place.  And that place 
ideally would be http://mapbuilder.osgeo.org
I think these are good ideas, but I don't want to move Mapbuilder tools 
under Collabnet as it stands.
I haven't notice a large uptake of Collabnet from other projects either, 
so I suspect others have similar reservations.

Problems with the current Collabnet:
====================================
1. Collabnet use many proprietary tools.  If someone stops paying for 
Collabnet support then Mapbuilder will have an expensive bill we can't 
pay, or we will be likely to loose a lot of our project data and/or we 
will require a lot of effort migrating our data to another platform.
I want an exit strategy which address how we can get our data out before 
we enter Collabnet.  I've mentioned this before but haven't heard a 
reasonable solution.

2. Many of the tools we currently used (supplied by Codehaus) are not 
supplied by Collabnet and the cost of migration is medium to high.

3. Ethically, I'd prefer to see Open Source projects use Open Souce 
tools.  Having said that, I'm also pragmatic and have made exceptions 
before for tools which are provided free for Open Souce Projects (as is 
the case with many of the Codehaus tools).

Proposal:
=========
1. I propose that Collabnet as it stands is not acceptable to be the 
OSGeo Platform.

2. As a group we define what we require from a platform.
This page is a good start:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Infrastructure_Migration

3. We decide how we can best achieve our requirements.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
http://cameron.shorter.net