[OSGeo-Discuss] Small projects

[Chris Holmes]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Ari Jolma wrote:
> 
>> Is there any idea in promoting projects, which develop small,
>> well-defined, interoperable tools? Is my impression correct that the
>> process that's been thought of for projects to join the foundation is a
>> bit heavy and perhaps not suitable for small projects? I believe
>> promoting interoperability is one of the foundations aims.
> 
> 
> Ari,
> 
> I have been asking myself this question too.  The "Project" infrastructure,
> requiring a PSC, an incubation period, committer agreements, web sub-domain
> and so forth seems pretty heavy.  So, I am doubtful that it would be
> appropriate to handle more modest sized project that way.   I have been
> asking myself a similar question about things like libtiff, libgeotiff,
> PROJ.4, MITAB, AVCE00 and Shapelib.  My conclusion so far is that they
> might be better handled as a sub-project of an existing major project
> (such as GDAL for the above file translators).   I am assuming that a
> sub-project would not need a PSC, but would be subject to the PSC of
> the project it is part of and mostly would just act as a part of that
> project as far as the foundation is concerned.
I've been thinking about this approach as well.  Apache definitely works 
that way, with db and jakarta.  And I think would work well for some of 
the sub-projects of the more established communities.  It also might 
make sense to have a 'front end' project, that groups together mapbender 
and mapbuilder, and other lighterweight web clients could also go in to 
that group.  Not that they wouldn't each have their own PSC, but such a 
grouping might be nice.  Something like quickWMS could live in that 
group without a PSC, for example.

> 
> However, even that approach does not really map to your toolset which
> is not really a sub-part of another project.  I'm not sure how to handle
> this.
> 
> One approach is to not have it be formally a foundation project.  The
> foundation is primarily useful for providing projects with infrastructure,
> promotion/visibility, a neutral venue for control, and some degree of
> organizational legitimacy.  Infrastructure is available from lots of
> sources (ie. SourceForge).  I don't think a neutral venue for project
> control is all that important for a small project.  Organizational
> legitimacy is not necessarily all that important for a small project
> though the promotion and visibility aspect could be nice.
> 
> I do expect the foundation to do some degree of promotion of quality
> projects that are not directly part of the foundation, but that
> build on foundation projects, or interoperate with them well or even
> that just fit in with the foundation philosophy well.  An obvious
> example of this is PostGIS.  It isn't a 'foundation project' but it is
> clearly part of the 'foundation stack' and the foundation can be
> expected to talk about it quite a bit.
I've been thinking about this too.  Call them 'foundational' projects, 
vs. foundation projects.  Projects that fit well in to the foundation, 
that get some decent promotion, that have foundation members involved, 
but that aren't official projects, perhaps they're not quite ready, and 
perhaps they have a reason or two not to be.


> 
> I could also see the possibility of forming language oriented interest
> groups within the foundation.  Somewhere that PHP, Perl, Python, Java
> or even c# users might get together and that would help prepare
> packaged binaries with language bindings for many foundation projects.
I like this a lot as well.  Perhaps we could start committees for them? 
  At the very least it'd be nice to have an email list where open source 
types from each can meet and discuss with one another, maybe work 
together.

I really like the idea of the foundation being used for 'planning', for 
when people are about to start a new os project, and can figure out 
what's out there.  Avoid things like uDig and gvSig starting at the same 
time without knowing that one another would be doing extremely similar 
stuff.  Maybe that should be split up in language lists, with one 
central list where a rep from each language could put someone to talk 
about what they're working on...

Chris

> 
> Hmm, this has gotten quite long, and without any really clear point.  I
> had better stop.  I would encourage you to join the incubator mailing list
> to help us consider the issues of smaller, or more aggregated projects
> when coming up with criteria and process for projects joining the 
> foundation.
> 
> Best regards,

-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
thoughts at: http://cholmes.wordpress.com
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