[OSGeo-Standards] Follow up from OSGeo board meeting

[Jody Garnett]

> 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 ?
>

Just so, so we should probably take down our GeoServer sticker - since it
does not represent testing of the bundle we currently distribute.

As for your actual question - you may have to consider the difference
between project and product.

The GeoServer community offers a download (i.e. a product) which could be
certified by OSGeo (perhaps at a reduced rate depending on how well the
board negotiates).

The same component is actually included in several other products:
- Boundless OpenGeo Suite
- GeoSolutions GeoServer Enterprise
- OSGeo GeoNetwork Open Source

As long as it is not the community doing the packaging, the above products
would not get the sticker. If they are using the component as published by
the community (say out of a maven repository) a downstream project (i.e.
GeoNetwork) or distribution (OSGeo Live) should be able to indicate an
GeoServer as an OGC certified component (i.e. it has passed testing).

Still we are down in the weeds here - the goal is to provide a motivation
for projects to join OSGeo, being in position to have their releases
certified would be a good win. Even just being  able to mark projects that
have done some testing is a decent win. Can you think of any others?

> 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 ;-)
>

Hence the sticker indicating what the client was tested with. I am not
aware of any general purpose open source clients for complex features,
simply nobody has been willing to pay for them :D

Jody
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