[OSGeo-Standards] Follow up from OSGeo board meeting

[Even Rouault]

Le mercredi 30 octobre 2013 07:21:00, Jody Garnett a écrit :
> Want to underline two aspects of the proposal:
> 
> 1) See if we can negotiate, or fund, cite certification for OSGeo projects.
> This would be a good high-level outcome to encourage projects to
> participate in OSGeo. It also helps showcase OGC certification, while not
> greatly impacting OGC revenue (as we have now proven that our OSGeo
> projects are not pursuing OGC certification on their own). 

Regarding certification, I went to read a bit on OGC site and found that : 
http://www.opengeospatial.org/compliance#trademark

So the fee is not a one time thing, but a yearly one, and depends on the 
"organization" revenue. This makes me wonder on how it could translate for our 
community projects, let's take MapServer as an example. What is the 
organization behind MapServer : OSGeo, any company offering services around 
MapServer... ? 
OGC licencing fee scheme seems to be designed for companies that have a 
distribution monopoly on the product being certified.
If certification fees would be waived for the OSGeo project iself, what would 
it mean for companies offering services around it : could they reuse the 
sticker on their web site, or should they pay the fee ?


> 2) Recognise testing beyond that the OGC is in position to offer, for
> example Client certification is not available.
> 
> This testing can probably only be offered against OSGeo projects such as
> GeoServer and MapServer, and can be used to promote that "cross project
> interoperability" we are supposed to be focusing on.

Client certification is indeed a difficult topic. You can have a WFS client that 
works fine when being used with a WFS server that delivers simple features 
("flat" organization of attributes), but that won't be able to understand 
complex features ( e.g. Inspire schemas ). This is not just a theoretical 
example ;-)

Even
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