Hamish wrote:
Cameron:
Infrastructure:
=========
* Formalise our project organisation somewhat, formalising
some of our processes (similar to OSGeo project
requirements).
as stated earlier, I am luke-cold on the idea of us going down
the path of applying for incubation status.
I don't care strongly about moving into incubation status. We don't need
to do this now. But do think that there are parts of the incubation
process which are low effort, and valuable.
IMHO for a small project such as ourselves it kills the vibrancy
of potential collaborators.
I agree that it is important to keep vibrancy, and don't want to impose
anything which kills this. I'd like to think that we can add minimal
process, without causing the issues you mention below.
Also I think the license issue is
a non-issue.
Five to ten years ago, I would have agreed with you. I've been around at
the start of a number of Open Source projects. In particular, I made
licencing recommendations which were followed for Geotools and
Mapbuilder projects which were convenient and non-perscriptive at the
time, which became quite painful to rectify 5 years later when the
projects matured.
It is much easier if you can sort out license issues at the start.
All contributed scripts are required to have a
license statement, and let's face it- we're not really creating
a new and unique work here, we're making a conglomerate of other
people's original works, hopefully into something who's whole is
greater than the sum of its parts.
The power and the decisions need to come bottom-up from the
representatives of the contributing projects and the conference
organizers. Even the suspicion of top-down or inner-clique
decisions kills dead new+outside contributions. Keep it open,
keep it public, keep decisions based on technical consensus of
the group, not on strategy (aka politics). Anyone who wants to
contribute a voice and has a good idea should get a say IMO.
I hear you. I agree that if a committee is set up, that it needs to have
a fully transparent decision making process (which is actually an OSGeo
incubation criteria).
I would hope that it is not too dissimilar to what we have now.
Which is a very long winded way of saying that when this project
no longer becomes fun to work on I'll drift away on to other
things with no hard feelings. I am interested in spending my
time making cool new tech, not having back room votes to decide
on which font to use or which wallpaper to use on the bike shed.
If we're doing this communication thing right, there should
never be an issue which requires a formal vote. At that point
the community is already fractured and the project is in real
trouble.
Also fwiw, I will not put my self in a position to take on legal
liability for something which pulls in binary blobs from the
four (respectable) corners of the internet and where someone
else has clicked-through license agreements for you, etc.
my 2c,
Hamish
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--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com
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