[OSGeo-Discuss] Small projects

[Ari Jolma]

Frank Warmerdam kirjoitti:
> However, I see this process as one of encouraging existing project
> developers to establish interoperability rather than the foundation
> launching specialized projects to make it happen.  In particular, it
> is not anticipated that the foundation itself will have any staff
> developers, unless one or more projects decide to spend their project
> sponsorship money to do so.  So I'm not sure how having the foundation
> start a project on it's own would actually make that project happen.

What I have in mind now is not so much interoperability, but another 
buzzword, namely reuse. Currently many projects have written code to do 
basically the same thing. Of course this cannot be avoided in many cases 
but generally reuse is a good thing. I have currently especially in mind 
a visualization/mapping library.


>
> I do think there are things the foundation, and an environment of
> collaboration can accomplish to improve interoperability and fill other
> holes, but ultimately the foundation has little capacity to fill the
> holes itself.  Organizations or individual contributors need to be
> motivated to make it happen.

If a common understanding of a need is seen on this list, that alone 
could give a good start.

>
> When you talk about enhancing the development of software stacks
> capable of solving complex problems, I wonder if you could explain
> a bit what you mean.  

ok, maybe that's me trying to be "scientific" and terse :) But the idea 
in general is nothing complex. What I mean that often real-world 
problems are solved with sub-optimal tools because people are using a 
single product. And I claim that at least one reason for this is that 
proprietary products try to keep their customers by trying to do 
everything (another is that people do not want or have the money the buy 
the best tool for all subproblems...). I the FOSS world this need not be 
the case and we can build stacks which contain optimal tools for all 
subproblems, i.e., combine GDAL, Grass, scripting, R spatial etc. The 
FOSS platform can easily support thicker stacks than the proprietary 
platform.

> Generally speaking open source projects are pretty
> good about supporting complex issues ... sometimes to a fault. :-)

I don't get this but I seem to have lost my capability to write and 
understand english suddenly :)

Cheers,

Ari

>
> Best regards,


-- 
Prof. Ari Jolma
Kartografia ja Geoinformatiikka / Cartography and Geoinformatics
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://www.tkk.fi/~jolma