Tyler Mitchell wrote:
I appreciate the concern from those of you who have built your businesses on MapServer, I certainly don't have as much at stake. But what I don't understand is why, for the broader community's benefit, the PR issue is such a barrier. Is that really standing in the way of your wanting to be involved in what you argue is a good idea?
As you will see from my sig, I am someone how has some experiance of Foundations related to Open Source products. Firebird is probably a special case, since the original Interbase was a commercial product, but Firebird is totally free of any restrictions, and the Foundation funds the core development team. We have some major contributors who fund their own developments, but all of that work is then rolled back into the open source product - towards a single goal.
There are a number of commercial developments that provide overlays to the core Firebird engine, and these can be considered as client and and management tools which make applications in particular areas easier to maintain and so are profitable. Since MapServer is the core engine and there are various editor and client applications available, the model is not to different.
The potential structure is not that dissimilar to that of Firebird but the major thing we found was that there should only be ONE target engine. Currently effort is split between two branches which address different problems and other branches were developing from that but now that the effort is being directed to a SINGLE code base things are a lot better. The 'Classic' and 'Superserver' versions of Firebird will still be maintained since they have plusses and minuses, but they are combined in the one core engine that provides an identical interface for who ever accesses it ( Along with the embeded version - but that is another story ;) )
Separate 'parallel' projects just divide effort, a single target is much more practical in the long run! Then there need be only one MapServer !!
-- Lester Caine ----------------------------- L.S.Caine Electronic Services Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.
