On Sep 30, 2007, at 4:10 PM, Paul Spencer wrote:
What do others think about this? Should OSGeo be in the business of helping new OSGeo projects get off the ground?
I don't think OSGeo should generally be in the business of getting new projects off the ground. I think a project should establish *itself* as a viable development entity before entertaining a relationship with OSGeo.
OSGeo promoting startup project "Foo" has the effect of giving it equal weight to all of the other projects within OSGeo. In my opinion, this has the effect of weakening OSGeo's promotional authority and providing an unnatural advantage to the Foo project. Growth that is too fast for a project can be just as detrimental as growth that is too slow. A project jumping into OSGeo and having it provide "umph" for the project disrupts the organic growth that I think is necessary for a project to become viable and successful. A project must find its niche on its own and garner development and developer traction because it fills a need, not because OSGeo says "you should use this great new thing because ...".
OSGeo's provides infrastructure to its member projects as an enticement to join. There are many options for a project's infrastructure, with everything from sourceforge to google code to standing up your own. OSGeo's infrastructure approach stands out because a project can collectively leverage other project's infrastructure while still having the flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want (given time/resources/volunteers). OSGeo's infrastructure is not a push-button operation though, and I don't think it would be as successful if it were (dealing with Google code or sourceforge is going to be much simpler than trying to deal with us, frankly).
I think a project needs to read Fogel (http://producingoss.com/), find its niche, grow a community around the development of the software, and then look to OSGeo for promotional, infrastructure, legal, and other support.
Howard _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
