Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] how did the paris code sprint go

[Howard Butler]

And mine

http://howardbutler.com/pdal-paris-sprint-recap.html

> On Mar 7, 2016, at 12:06 PM, Paul Ramsey  wrote:
> 
> Here's mine
> 
> http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2016/03/paris-code-sprint-postgis-recap.html
> 
> On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 11:59 AM, Jody Garnett  wrote:
>> Taking this out to a seperate email thread - several projects had a plan
>> going in, how did it go?
>> 
>> PostGIS Agenda
>> SFCGAL Agenda
>> OTB Agenda
>> GDAL Agenda
>> GRASS GIS Agenda
>> MapServer Agenda
>> Point Cloud Agenda
>> iTowns Agenda
>> 
>> Oliver has gathered blog posts and feedback from participants on the wiki.
>> --
>> Jody Garnett
>> 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo4W orphaned?

[Howard Butler]

> On Nov 14, 2015, at 5:36 PM, Jürgen E. Fischer  wrote:
> 
> Hi Helmut,
> 
> On Sat, 14. Nov 2015 at 23:18:36 +0100, Helmut Kudrnovsky wrote:
>> Is OSGeo4W orphaned? 
> 
> No.   But it's mostly only getting updates on GRASS (but only 32bit) and QGIS.
> Dependencies are usually only updated if required.  And I'm not sure if
> everything in OSGeo4W is ready to work with GDAL 2 (IIRC OTB doesn't support
> GDAL 2 yet).

No, not orphaned. PDAL also uses OSGeo4W64 as its main Windows distribution 
mechanism. 

It may be a bit early to jump on the "GDAL 2.x+ only" packaging scenario, 
especially for many packages. Maybe we should explore keeping 1.x and 2.x GDAL 
separate for a while as the packages slowly catch up. Not ideal, I know.

Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The LAS format, the ASPRS, and the “LAZ clone” by ESRI

[Howard Butler]

> On Mar 3, 2015, at 12:13 AM, Even Rouault  wrote:
> 
> Hi Cameron,
> 
>> It is difficult for OSGeo to stop a vendor from promoting their product,
>> or promoting a specific lock in strategy.
> 
> Of course. That was exactly my point.

OSGeo can wag its finger at people and say "drugs are bad" all it wants, but 
that isn't going to change the outcome in any substantive way. The reality is 
if zLAS is more convenient for its users, and it is better than open 
alternatives like LAZ, people are going to use it. On technical merits, it 
might be that zLAS is marginally better than LAZ in some situations, but LAZ 
can still evolve if people put the resources into it. On the ecosystem merits, 
it might be that zLAS is super convenient for Arc* users who don't want to ever 
tread outside their gated community. Whatever the reasons, zLAS will or won't 
gain traction based on the marketplace determining its usefulness -- not 
organizations like OSGeo or even ASPRS crying foul.

The only worthy nit to pick is with zLAS's name being derived from or similar 
to the ASPRS LAS name. Whether intentional or not, this implies some kind of 
relationship between the two things. If ASPRS is to make that complaint, 
however, ESRI can rightly point at LASzip (but not LAZ) for the same 
name-confusing infraction. 

Personally, I'm extremely skeptical. LAZ has tons of uptake, there's already a 
ton of data available in the format, and pretty much every significant point 
cloud/LiDAR software out there *besides* ESRI implements at least read support 
for it (using the laszip.org codebase). Any other compressed point cloud format 
would have to be many *times* better than LAZ to be closed and overcome it. A 
few percent better isn't going to matter. 

The situation is way better than it was in the geospatial imagery space say 15 
years ago or even today, where closed commercial formats still control much of 
the market.  LAZ has commoditized the fat part of the point cloud compression 
market so effectively that there is little headroom for a commercial approach 
to operate except for strategic situations like zLAS. In my opinion, zLAS is a 
canary indicator of the success, not failure, of LAZ. It's an attempt by ESRI 
to innovate in an area that matters to its users in a way that serves ESRI's 
business interests.  Everything else that's interesting is already covered by 
LAZ.

LAZ has had very few resources put into it. Martin Isenburg developed it, and I 
helped to license it, package it, and release it as an open source library. 
Beyond that, no significant institutional support has come along to support 
specification development, to support standardization, or even to pay for new 
features like alternative spatial organization like zLAS supports. If the 
community values these things, it needs to pay for it or start putting in the 
time/effort to make it happen. Thus far, it hasn't.


>> But we can:
>> * Support the OGC in developing an OGC standard for LiDAR. Once a
>> standard is in place, there is a much stronger reason to make use of
>> that Open Standard. In particular, many national government agencies
>> have policies which promote standards over proprietary interfaces.
> 
> With my mostly uninformed eyes in that topic, I don't know if OGC is the most 
> relevant organization in that matter. It seems that the ASPRS would be a more 
> natural host as it has already published the spec of the (uncompressed) LAS 
> format:
> http://www.asprs.org/Committee-General/LASer-LAS-File-Format-Exchange-
> Activities.html

As Michael mentioned, ASPRS is poorly suited for development of technical 
software specifications. There is no standard ratification procedure, no 
procedural way to resolve disputes, no typical standards-body IP protections, 
and no rules to ensure the playing field is even from the start. Of course, the 
ASPRS LAS committee can say, "go use E57, which is lives inside ASTM and has 
all those operational features you request," but very few softwares use that 
format. LAS was there first and it was good enough. It's neither the best nor 
the easiest to use, and it doesn't cover the problem of point cloud data 
transmission most generically or efficiently. It covers the problem well 
enough, and it has wide support in a number of softwares (sales pitch: even in 
your browser with http://plas.io !). It's going to be around for a 
ooonnnggg time, and shapefile or GeoTIFF are prefect comparisons. 

> I'm not sure about the LASzip format however, the compressed one, which is 
> the 
> one that ESRI has "cloned" into zLAS. I skimmed through 
> http://www.laszip.org/ 
> and couldn't find a reference to something more formal than LGPL code that 
> implements it ;-)

There's actually two implementations now, though the second implementation 
https://github.com/verma/laz-perf is derived from the original LASzip codebase. 
The second, which my company developed, allows LAZ to work in Javascript in 
addition to C/C++ (f

Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 23, 2014, at 10:13 AM, P Kishor  wrote:

> Membership dues for OSGeo could very well work, but they would change the 
> nature of the organization.

Yes, that may be true, however it is also true that OSGeo as an organization 
has significantly evolved significantly two or three times since it was 
incorporated. OSGeo is not the "GeoApache" once envisioned and partially 
implemented. The sociological structure of open source projects, as elucidated 
by Fogel and modeled by OSGeo, has changed a ton in the past eight years. OSGeo 
has evolved to keep up and remain relevant, and it must continue to do so.

Does the membership see paid membership as a radical change? I don't have an 
answer to that, and presumably it is something that would have to be voted on. 

> While it makes sense for those who are professionals and thus want to belong 
> to professional organizations, many OSGeo members are not "professionals" in 
> the sense of depending upon OSGeo's projects for their living—many are 
> educators, volunteers, govt. folks, hobbyists and so on.

Except for maybe hobbyists, all of these groups of people you've listed often 
pay for membership in professional organizations. A professional organization 
does not have to mean you make a living doing the thing that the professional 
organization coalesces around. Instead, in my mind, it means you have an 
interest in participating in that particular profession. Geographers. Soil 
Science. Geophysics.  Watermelons [1]. They lobby, educate, and host on your 
behalf.

> That said, not everyone has to be a member of OSGeo to enjoy its products and 
> its community, and believe in the ideals of the community. I have no 
> particular objection to membership dues, but it is not something I would pay. 
> Hence, I would agree to forsake my Charter Membership, if that is what's 
> entailed.

Do you lose a significant benefit by not being a Charter Member? Just the 
ability to vote for the board and the ability to tout your exclusivity on a 
vita/resume. Anything else? Lack of membership does not prevent anyone from 
participating now, and we wouldn't want it to (unlike many other professional 
organizations). 

Howard

[1] Seriously. http://www.nationalwatermelonassociation.com/membership.php
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] What's wrong? (was Re: Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members)

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 23, 2014, at 10:16 AM, Michael P. Gerlek  wrote:

> I’ve not been following this issue closely, so I just went back through the 
> old mails and I’m still left with this rather basic question:
> 
> What is the problem that we are trying to solve?

OSGeo's membership process is completely adhoc, and it prevents people who wish 
to be members from doing so. Seemingly, the only two benefits of membership are 
1) able to vote for board and 2) able to trumpet to world you're a member. A 
paid membership doesn't doesn't really change that, but it does help OSGeo in a 
number of important ways:

* Our organization would look pretty much exactly like all the other similar 
professional organizations to the IRS
* It smoothes out our revenue and provides a floor for things like 
infrastructure, accounting, insurance, etc which are things a proper org needs 
but OSGeo often lacks.
* Anyone who wants to be a member can pay the fee, get the tshirt, and be a 
member. 

> What started this movement?

I don't know that there's so much a movement, but rather a realization by some 
that the membership process is a bit broken.  To simply let any/all who want to 
be an OSGeo member has the board-packing concerns brought up during the 
inaugural organization meeting. 

> What in our organization is “broken” that needs to be fixed?

* The CRO's administration of the board vote and membership rolls is a hard, 
thankless job that ends up suffering the brunt of OSGeo's broken membership 
process. 

* People who wish to be members of OSGeo can't simply sign up.

* OSGeo's purported revenue model of soliciting large donations from private 
organizations does not match its real revenue model of harvesting income from 
the FOSS4G conference. 

Howard

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 23, 2014, at 9:25 AM, Bart van den Eijnden  wrote:

> Good food for thought Howard, can’t say I disagree with anything you say here.
> 
> The only thing we need to consider is that for some countries 50 or 70 USD 
> can still be a lot of money

Yes. Something equitable could be arrived at. Let the membership committee come 
up with the membership dues rules. I would assume there's student memberships, 
grants, etc. 

Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 20, 2014, at 7:38 AM, Cameron Shorter  wrote:

> Thanks Paul, Dimitris and Peter for your thoughts.
> 
> Comments inline.
> 
> On 20/06/2014 4:31 am, Paul Ramsey wrote:
>> http://www.aag.org/cs/membership/individual_membership
>> http://www.aag.org/cs/membership/individual_membership/dues
>> 
>> 
>> Both simpler, and better for the bottom line of OSGeo, if you want to
>> be a member, sign up as a member, collect your t-shirt, see you @
>> foss4g.
>> 
> Yes Paul, "pay for membership" is simple, but I'd argue that the value of 
> OSGeo and OSGeo communities is the volunteer time we contribute, and "pay 
> membership" wouldn't capture that.

This property is the nature of a professional organization, which in my 
opinion, OSGeo clearly is. There are a number of strong reasons why small 
annual fees for membership are very attractive. The first is there's no 
struggling with members who've dropped off, haven't voted, are no longer 
participating. Second, anyone who wants to associate themselves can simply do 
so by paying dues. Finally, a consistent, if small, operating revenue. 

The voting process has been an ad-hoc affair since the beginnings of the 
organization. Every year it the rules are tweaked. Every year members who've 
dropped off need to be nagged. Every year we end up just taking everyone who's 
nominated anyway. It's a lot of overhead and volunteer cost for very little 
gain.

It is certain there are people who wish to be professionally associated with 
OSGeo who are unable to become members because they haven't generated enough 
public profile to be nominated. You can't nominate yourself. It's a chicken and 
egg problem that simply dissolves with paid-but-small membership dues.

OSGeo's main revenue stream is the FOSS4G conference. It is an event run on the 
backs of local chapter volunteers. Please correct me otherwise, but I do not 
think any local chapter who has hosted FOSS4G has ever put in a proposal to 
host it again. This well may eventually run dry. Or, it may run dry for a year 
or two. 80-100k/year (~$50-70/year * 1500 persons) of membership dues is plenty 
to keep the lights on through droughts and still allow the organization to move 
forward. 

At the inception of the organization, a driving factor toward our current 
membership structure is because OSGeo is a volunteer organization, it shouldn't 
require members to pay money. I think this is misguided. Every other 
professional organization of which I'm a member requires membership dues. As an 
IRS classification, a professional organization has a clear path forward. 

I am a professional open source Geo/GIS software developer. I want to belong to 
a professional organization that represents me. I would be happy to pay some 
nominal membership dues that a) signify my membership, b) provide financial 
buffer for the organization to achieve its mission, and 3) clearly signal what 
the rules are to become a member.

My $0.02.

Howard


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] las spec doubt

[Howard Butler]

On Oct 31, 2013, at 2:38 AM, andrea antonello  
wrote:

> Hi everyone, I hope this is not OT.
> I wanted to ask a short advice on a las file content problem.
> 
> I wanted to get a short comment about how GPS Week Time is seen in the
> las format.
> 
> Let's assume the las file format is prior to 1.2, so no encoding
> information is available to open possibility for adjusted gps time.
> 
> In that case, is it so that the Gps Week Time is just the seconds in
> the week, without any information about the week?
> I was under the assumption that the format of GPS Week Time would be
> "week.time" as content of the double, hence giving a full timestamp
> information.
> 
> I can't find a document exactly specifying this, the las specs just
> state: "GPS Time: The GPS time is the double floating point time tag
> value at which the point was acquired."
> 
> It is interesting, since I often found the header's date not being
> accurate (and seems to reflect the file modification date), making it
> impossible for me to define a unique timestamp.
> 
> Thanks for any comment, or link to docs.

This item is quite off-topic for this mailing list. I suggest emailing the 
following google group for access to more LAS implementors and knowledgable 
folks.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lasroom

Howard

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Sol Katz Award Nomination procedure (was Nomination for Venkatesh Raghavan)

[Howard Butler]

On Sep 18, 2012, at 9:53 AM, Richard Greenwood  
wrote:

> I agree that this is the first year that nominations have been
> publicly discussed and it is a departure from previous years. I
> followed Jeff's lead when I nominated Chris.
> 
> But hey, we're an open community, I think it's even in the name
> somewhere. And spreading a little recognition around to hard working
> members of our community surely doesn't hurt.

I disagree. The history of the award has been a cloistered deliberation of 
private nominations. The award is not a political exercise, or at least it 
hasn't been to this point, and public nominations tip things toward the 
lobbying direction. Every open source contributor wouldn't mind an award in the 
field of excellence, and every contributor deserves a pat on the back or two.

Open nominations opens up a more than few cans of worms:

- I won't say some stuff about a person in a public nomination that I would in 
a private one. First off, I don't want to embarrass them, as some people are 
embarrassed by public fawning.

- Not every activity and action needs to be billboarded. If you look at the 
list of past winners, a common trait they all share is they all have kept their 
heads down and done a lot for the community as whole without regard to 
recognition. 

- I might not want everyone to know who I'm nominating.

- Are we voting on the award? Lobbying the committee? What does a public 
nomination achieve other than to provide a (biased) public attaboy? There are 
plenty of opportunities for those that do not have to be conflated with a 
nomination process.

The award is selected by an exclusive group of individuals, and this act makes 
it an exclusive award. The Oscar or Peabody or Pulitzer of open source GIS is 
much more interesting than the People's Choice. Let's keep it that way.

Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Board elections Voting

[Howard Butler]

> On 2012/07/24, at 13:48, Ravi Kumar wrote:
> 
>> Please consider changing the rule that only One vote for one candidate (by 
>> the charter member) in the Board election.
>> 
>> Advantages:
>> The only way to show that you prefer a candidate is by voting to him / her 
>> more than once.

Disadvantages:

It allows a small, concentrated, and coordinated group of people to ensure that 
their one or two preferred candidates make it onto the board without otherwise 
having broad support of the electorate. After one or two election cycles, the 
board could be replaced with these "selected" board members through this 
effort.  Giving a member the ability to give 5 votes to one individual 
essentially gives them 5x the voting power for an individual candidate, and 
considering the fact that generally speaking the majority of the electorate 
doesn't stack their votes, differentially provides them even more voting power. 
 A statistical analysis and simulation of how this weighting works is left to 
the reader.

One member, one candidate, one vote. 

What is needs of the electorate or board are being served by having our 
election procedure be something otherwise?

Howard

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Charter Member Nomination: Michael Smith

[Howard Butler]

Thirded. Michael is a fantastic contributor to the North American code sprints, 
the annual benchmarking exercise (including acquiring hardware and bandwidth to 
support it), and the MapServer and GDAL projects in addition to involvement 
with PDAL.

Howard

On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:40 PM, Daniel Morissette wrote:

> I second Michael's nomination, and was quite surprised when I found out that 
> he was not a charter member yet. Mike and the team he works with have been 
> long time users and active supporters of MapServer, GDAL/OGR and several 
> other OSGeo projects since long before the creation of OSGeo.
> 
> Actually, we're so used to seeing him around and actively involved that we 
> just assumed that he was already a charter member when he is not. (That's 
> probably the case of a few other individuals)
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 
> On 12-06-28 8:48 AM, Jeff McKenna wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>> 
>> I have the honor to nominate Michael Smith for OSGeo Charter membership.
>> 
>> Mike is with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Remote Sensing GIS Center,
>> and has been a longtime supporter of FOSS.  Most recently he is working
>> very hard with Howard Butler to develop an Open Source point cloud
>> translation library, PDAL[1].  Mike is also very active in the
>> MapServer[2] community, as one of its most vocal power users, and in
>> 2011 he was named to the MapServer Project Steering Committee[3].
>> 
>> I also had the pleasure of giving a MapServer workshop with Mike at
>> FOSS4G 2011 in Denver; many attendees said that it was a wonderful
>> workshop, and I attribute that to Mike's thorough knowledge of MapServer
>> and its recent changes.
>> 
>> Mike is often one of the first to sign up for Code Sprints, and register
>> for FOSS4G events, which to me says everything about his passion for
>> this community.  He may not prefer to be giving fancy presentations and
>> taking the glory, but scratch the surface of many OSGeo communities and
>> you'll find Mike supporting it in every way he can.
>> 
>> I feel that Mike Smith would be an excellent representative of OSGeo.
>> 
>> -jeff
>> 
>> 
>> [1] http://www.pointcloud.org/
>> [2] http://www.mapserver.org/
>> [3] http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-23.html
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Morissette
> http://www.mapgears.com/
> Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G North America Conference coming April 10-12

[Howard Butler]

On Jan 23, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Volker Mische wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> as many of you probably know, I was strongly against having a North
> American FOSS4G, as it might draw the attention away from the
> international one, and I vaporise the yearly gathering of the
> (developer) tribe.

I never understood this rationale. Can you explain it further?  To me, it seems 
to presume that all of the momentum behind these technologies is in North 
America and Europe.  If that assumption is true, why should the conference 
continue to move around the world and avoid a more massive audience that can 
support it?  If that presumption is false, why can't a conference in non-NA/EU 
parts of the world be just as vibrant and interesting?

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proj4 texts in spatialreference.org missing +towgs84=0, 0, 0

[Howard Butler]

On Jul 5, 2011, at 7:47 AM, Ari Jolma wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> spatialreference.org (which is a great service) reports the proj4 text for 
> for example 3067 without the towgs84 parameters when they are all zeros. IMHO 
> they should be reported as proj4 nowadays requires them to work correctly. 
> The proj4 epsg file contains them. The zeros are needed also in the proj4text 
> field of spatial_ref_sys table of PostGIS.
> 
> Omitting towgs parameters (even when they are zeros) causes confusion. See 
> for example
> 
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.postgis/24549 (the comment "This is 
> bewildering. I found this by mere chance").
> 
> and I also experienced the same today with PostGIS converting from 2393 to 
> 3067.

Ari,

This is most likely simply a matter of the proj version being used on 
spatialreference.org not being up-to-date.  spatialreference.org is entirely 
run by volunteers (mostly Chris), and he hasn't had any bandwidth to dedicate 
to it lately.  If you are interested in picking things up, please join the 
MetaCRS (cc'd) list, which is the group that currently oversees it.  I'm sure 
Chris would have no problem handing you the keys to the VM it lives on to 
update things and add the features you need.

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Are Ari Jolma and Howard Butler standing for re-election to the OSGeo Board?

[Howard Butler]

On Aug 12, 2010, at 11:13 AM, Ari Jolma wrote:

> Landon Blake wrote:
>> 
>> I’m just curious, because I didn’t see there names listed on the nominations 
>> list.
>> 
> 
> Landon,
> 
> AFAIK, nobody have submitted nominations for me or Howard. On the wiki there 
> are four nominations and I've seen two more (Lorenzo Becchi and Daniel 
> Morrissette) on this list. I think it is a good thing to see some change in 
> the board - but I'm also glad to see that Arnulf and Frank are available for 
> re-election.

I am not standing for re-election this year.  It has been an honor to serve.

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] server down?

[Howard Butler]

On Jul 22, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:


> - (sorry if I'm rude, but) are we sure we can't do better to manage a vital
> infrastructure? More than 10 days on a backup server does not sound very good 
> to me;
> weren't the blades new?

The support of OSGeo's system infrastructure is a volunteer affair.  If it is 
not up, or not up to your standards, it is because you haven't volunteered to 
help fix it :)  We can do better with your help.

The blades are rather old (early 2006'ish) machines that are equivalent to 
laptops of that time in terms of memory, processor speed, and harddrive.  I 
find it impressive we made it this far on them without significantly improving 
the hardware or updating the system software, while continually heaping more 
and more tasks on them.  The compromise, while a PITA, is an excellent 
opportunity to improve our capabilities, even though it is taking a bit of time 
to complete the job.

Please join the SAC list and participate there for all issues related to OSGeo 
computing infrastructure 

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 5 Star OSGeo project maturity rating

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 7, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Bob Basques wrote:

> Wouldn't it seem prudent to classify the projects before trying to compare 
> them?

/me screams into a room that no one can hear.  Stop it!

This whole exercise is quite frankly, masturbatory, and does nothing to help 
the projects who would be rated, provides very little to those "users" of said 
ratings, and calls into question our credibility by having the arrogance to 
rate *our own* projects in any way.  OSGeo is doing enough by providing 
visibility for the projects, and it is up to them to pull them in as users with 
the quality of their software, the quality of their documentation, and the 
quality of their community.  A silly sticker by us or anyone else isn't going 
to sway that process in any way. 

It would be more valuable to collate a series of "elevator pitch"-type material 
from each project who wishes to participate to make their case to the 
envisioned users of this rating.  Projects who do not participate in this for 
whatever reason implicitly make a statement about their quality. That's going 
to be far more useful to both the projects and the users than an elongating 
graphic.

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Help authoring tools

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 1, 2010, at 12:34 PM, Stefan Steiniger wrote:
>> On 06/01/2010 10:00 AM, Daniel Ames wrote:
>>> Do any of you have a preferred open source help authoring tool? We're 
>>> looking for something to document our projects on web pages - something 
>>> better than wiki - and also to download and install with software. Must be 
>>> cross platform, etc. I'd like to use whatever others are using in the OSGeo 
>>> community for consistency... - Dan

Daniel,

MapServer, GeoTools, OpenLayers, GeoServer, Shapely, libLAS, and GeoDjango all 
use Sphinx .  In my opinion, Sphinx's great 
advantages in order of importance are:

- text-like markup (docbook is too much burden on documentation writers).  
Restructured text is not too difficult to learn, but I wish the world would 
agree on a text-like markup (markdown, restructured text, wikitext, etc)
- variety of output.  Besides html, you can do ePub, PDF (multiple ways -- via 
latex or stand alone), windows compiled help, qthelp, man
- pretty output
- simple installation and management

I know there are some sphinx skeptics from the MapServer project on this list 
who might chime up one way or another about its level of success within the 
MapServer project, but I think its implementation has help our project 
immensely.  

GDAL is still using Doxygen for its documentation generation.

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGEO projects and Python 3.x

[Howard Butler]

On Jan 3, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Dave Sampson wrote:

> Hey Folks,
> 
> I am wondering what, if any, projects are preparing or planning for a
> move to support python 3.x.
> 
> Due to it being a major release I understand it does not come with
> backwards compatibility, however there are some tools out there to help
> with this. and of course there is surely to be lots of hands on
> tweaking.
> 
> This also raises questions about projects using jython as it just
> released Jython 2.5.1 in september of 2009.
> 
> If there are projects moving towards this assume there are libraries
> that will also have to create bindings and such.
> 
> with the Public Address Geocoder project (http://www.pagcgeo.org/) I
> just created python bindings for the library. I am wondering if I should
> go ahead with python 3.x bindings. Using SWIG this should not be a
> challenge. 
> 
> so what are people doing with python 3?


While the expectation is such that people aren't requiring the usage of Python 
3 that widely, and most of the distributions haven't picked it up yet, there's 
some support in the Open Source GIS realm.  Thanks to Even Rouault, GDAL 1.7 
will have Python 3 support through SWIG, though it will be somewhat limited by 
numpy not being ported to Python 3.x.  libLAS also provides support for Python 
3.x via ctypes.  I know that Shapely also has some Python 3 support. I am sure 
there are many others.

I would say that Python 3.x is not widely enough used to require *only* Python 
3.  You must support both the 2.x and 3.x right now (my guess is that you'll 
probably want to support Python 2.x for at least the next five years as well), 
either within the same codebase or as two separate sub-libraries that are 
mostly the same code.

Howard


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Howard Butler]

On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:


Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over
the next 3 and 5 years.  I'd really like to hear thoughts on the  
matter

and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst
committees, projects, chapters and the board.

It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election  
to

get a sense of where other members are thinking these days.



My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in  
the next 3-5 years are the following three items:
- Continued expansion of the local chapters.  Local chapters make  
OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC  
channel can't.
- The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and  
we start to use it our central fundraising piece.
- Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs,  
benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be  
fostered by us.  From my biased developer's perspective, these have  
been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter  
development and consolidation of the conference.


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] trac non-functional

[Howard Butler]

On Jun 19, 2009, at 6:35 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:


Hi all.
Are there any plans to solve the horrible slowness and tendency to
return errors of the trac? We are working a lot on the qgis trac,  
but it

is a real pain, to the point that we are kind of thinking to write an
interface to the trac caching the results for quick search (what a  
waste

of time).


Paolo,

The problem is a volunteer manpower one.  There are definitely plans,  
it is just a matter of finding the time in which we can shut down and  
implement them.  I'm sorry that I can't give a better answer than  
that.  If you have time you can devote to the effort, please join the  
SAC list, and we can get you up to date with all of the issues.  We  
would happily add another administrator of Trac if you have lots of  
familiarity with it (especially mod_python, mod_wsgi and sqlite{1,3}  
vs external db like pg).


Howard 
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] copyright question

[Howard Butler]

On Dec 9, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote:


Hi list,

today I was in a meeting about GeoExt, and the following question  
came up:


"Is it possible for OsGeo to take copyright for a project which yet  
has to form and has not passed incubation as such?"


It's certainly much easier than getting all past contributors to sign  
off.  As to whether or not we allow that, I don't think we have any  
precedent.  I don't know who you'd ask other than maybe the incubation  
committee to come up with a policy that they could recommend to the  
board to sign off on.  I think the incubation committee is the place  
to have the argument whether OSGeo can support setting up a shell to  
hold a potential project including copyright assignment.  From a  
systems standpoint, we do support shell or nascent projects, but not  
from a legal one AFAIK.





A commercial company has expressed issues contributing if the  
copyright is not owned by a trustworthy independent organization  
such as OsGeo.




In my opinion, copyright really only matters if you are going to  
*change the license* after the fact.  Getting contribution under a  
license that people can agree to is more important than who maintains  
the copyright and has the ability to change the license if they want  
at some point in the future after the project has been going.  In  
fact, the more contributors there are, the harder it becomes to go  
back and change things.  IMO, this voids the worry about trust.  Trust  
the license under which you agree to participate in the project, not  
the individual who maintains the copyright on the one source file in  
the project that adds XYZ feature.


Howard
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Service Outage on 12/6/08 1700 UTC

[Howard Butler]

I would inform you that there will be a scheduled OSGeo web server  
service outage on Dec 6 at 1700 UTC.  It is expected to last 3 hours  
until 2000 UTC.   The lights will probably flicker a bit during that  
time as we work through some svn/trac authentication issues.


Howard
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[OSGeo-Discuss] libLAS - A C/C++/Python library for processing ASPRS LAS LiDAR data

[Howard Butler]

All,

I am pleased to announce the 1.0.0b1 release of libLAS - A C/C++/ 
Python library for processing ASPRS LAS LiDAR data.  libLAS supports  
LAS 1.0 and 1.1 formats, and it is available under the terms of the  
BSD license.  libLAS's initial development was supported by the Iowa  
Department of Natural Resources, and its primary developers are Howard  
Butler and Mateusz Loskot.  Special features of libLAS include:


- C, C++, and Python APIs -- embed libLAS in your own programs or use  
the Python bindings for a one-off processing script
- Spatial Reference System support -- the LAS format uses geotiff keys  
for SRS support and libLAS does the work of translating and storing  
them when you link in the latest (CVS) version of libgeotiff
- Command-line utilities -- libLAS provides ports of Martin Isenburg's  
LAStools utilities for doing things like translating from one version  
of the LAS format to another, inspecting header information, and  
translating LAS data to and from text.
- Cross-platform operation -- libLAS is known to work on MSVC 7.1+  
(Windows) and GCC 4.1+ (OS X and Linux) platforms on both big- and  
little-endian architectures


Homepage
---
http://liblas.org/

Mailing List
---
http://mail.hobu.net/mailman/listinfo/liblas-devel

Release information
---
http://liblas.org/wiki/1.0.0b1

Source release
---
http://liblas.org/raw-attachment/wiki/1.0.0b1/las-1.0.0b1.tar.bz2
http://liblas.org/raw-attachment/wiki/1.0.0b1/las-1.0.0b1.tar.bz2.md5

Windows Binary

http://liblas.org/raw-attachment/wiki/1.0.0b1/liblas1.0.0b1-win32.zip
http://liblas.org/raw-attachment/wiki/1.0.0b1/liblas1.0.0b1-win32.zip.md5

Python PyPI

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/libLAS/1.0.0b1

Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Howard Butler]

On May 6, 2008, at 3:10 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

In the past i've heard it suggested that really successful open source
projects now need serious organisational backing. They can't be built
by a network of partly-funded enthusiast contributors alone.



I think really successful open source projects are successful because  
of serious organization, not necessarily a fire hose of funding. By  
serious organization, I don't mean a rickety scaffolding of  
bureaucracy.  OSGeo's incubation process prescribes a bureaucracy  
(project steering committees) onto projects to be accepted as part of  
incubation.  Some projects within OSGeo embrace this whole heartedly,  
while others continue their lieutenants' model or dictatorship due to  
those being active ending up making the decisions -- with the checks  
and balances the PSC approach hopes to achieve (no project as far as I  
know has had such a knock-down, drag out to actually test this  
assumption).  The incubation process tries to prescribe the PSC model  
because it desires that incoming projects "be organized" in such a way  
as to be able to keep its own house in order in the event of problems  
that affect its open development.  I think development organization is  
what sets apart one blob of source code from another where both might  
do the same thing.  I think OSGeo wants projects that are thriving  
communities for a number of reasons, but I'll leave it up to others to  
decide if we actually meet that bar with all of our projects.


Serious organization requires infrastructure -- something that's easy  
enough to get these days (SourceForge, Google dev, even OSGeo if you  
can jump through the hoops) -- but more importantly, it requires *use*  
of that infrastructure.  One thing that I have found out recently when  
developing on a small open source project (http://liblas.org) is that  
Brook's notion about geometric communication load applies.  With a one  
or two person project, does it make sense to file every notable change  
into a bug tracking system, ensure that changesets only deal with one  
specific issue, and avoid communicating about design and code  
organization in forums that do not log things for posterity?  The  
overhead to do that stuff is fixed, and quite expensive especially  
considering that you only have one or two folks writing the software  
hoping to get it to a functional point.  Without it, however,  
interested parties have no real way to empower themselves into  
becoming active contributors to the project without drawing  
significant load from the active developers.  Because developers come  
and go to a project, this process repeats itself unless the project  
itself makes it possible for people to bootstrap themselves -- a long  
term investment unlikely to pay off at all in the short term.



If a project has a given amount of momentum, marketing resources
applied to it, a contributing user community; is there any sense in
"competing" by building something new with a lot of conceptual
overlap? If there isn't, don't de facto monopolies start to develop
inside FOSS as much as they do in proprietary software systems?



There sure is a reason to compete -- to build (or aspire to build) a  
better product.  MapServer, for example, has Mapnik.  I think Artem's  
quest to show us how wrong we were has had a positive impact on both  
projects (speaking as a MapServer dev).  Each software does different  
things better, and both projects have driven innovation in the other.  
I would say that Mapnik still doesn't have all of the inertia that  
MapServer enjoys, and I think it suffers from some of the  
organizational challenges I described above (MapServer too), but from  
my perspective it has been steadily gaining steam and meets any  
definition of open source success.  It hasn't needed OSGeo to have an  
impact.


MapServer and Mapnik overlap in a lot of conceptual areas, and there's  
plenty of room for both.  What there isn't plenty of is C/C++  
developers who wish to develop open source GIS rendering software for  
web applications.  I would argue that if there are any monopolies to  
be gained in open source software development that they are monopolies  
of developers' attention, not monopolies of software products.


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal: OSGeo Python Library

[Howard Butler]

On Apr 7, 2008, at 7:52 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Markus Neteler wrote:

Hi OSGeo,
I would like to propose another idea which might be a (long term)  
goal

of OSGeo software development:
OSGeo Python Library
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Python_Library
Currently it is quite complex to set up a Python based OSGeo software
environment without knowing well the individual projects. It would  
be great
to have a common abstraction layer/API which contains binding to  
several

relevant OSGeo and related software projects with Python bindings to
simplify programming.
Hacks to the Wiki page and comments welcome,


Markus,

I think to a large extent the Python Cartographic Library and related
efforts aspire to do this.  They provide a very pythonic interface
to projects like GDAL/OGR, MapServer, PROJ.4, and so forth.  I have
added a brief note pointing to http://gispython.org/ but I think any
real effort to progress on this should involve understanding what is
already there at gispython.org.  It might be fruitful to discuss the
idea with Sean Gilles or Howard Butler who are knowledgable about
the existing python interfaces.


PCL is actually moving the other way.  Rather than a unified,  
monolithic wrapper around the entire Python geo world, Sean and co.  
have been breaking things up into smaller pieces with common API (like  
__geo_interface__).  Examples of this approach include libraries like  
Shapely (builds on GEOS), Rtree (builds on Marios Hadjieleftheriou's  
spatialindex), OWSLib (OGC capabilities parsing and functionality),  
and WorldMill (yet another GDAL/OGR binding).


The downside of a monolithic wrapper of everything is that getting the  
dependencies together is downright overwhelming for most folks.   
Additionally, often people only want individual pieces of the pie --  
spatial indexing or geographic algebra -- and don't need everything.


I think the most fruitful way to make it easier for folks to be able  
to use Python for geo stuff is to ensure that projects do the following:


1) Embrace PyPI.  I made a major push with GDAL 1.5 to allow it to be  
built from *outside* the GDAL source tree.  This means that a user can  
install gdal-bin and gdal-devel with their favorite package management  
system and then do "easy_install GDAL" and have working bindings.  I  
would like to get Python MapScript to this point as well, but doing so  
will require a bit more effort than GDAL to get MapServer's source  
tree in shape (MapServer isn't really split into -devel and -bin, it's  
all just a big ball right now).  Projects that aspire to be on PyPI  
and be easier to use from a Python perspective should ensure they're  
using Python distutils/setuptools and not require that an entire  
source tree of dependencies be available to build themselves.


2) Leverage Python docstrings.  I also made a lot of effort to include  
Python docstrings in the OGR 1.5 release.  I haven't gotten to GDAL's  
yet, but I hope to in the future.  doctests, which are Python's name  
for combining documentation with regression testing, are also an  
excellent way to provide leverage.  Python users have been heavily  
conditioned to look for doctests/docstrings in other Python libraries,  
and the OSGeo camp should follow suit.


3) Support things like __geo_interface__ and numpy's array interface.   
Python makes it so easy for everyone to write their own that everyone  
does.  There are bits that everyone can agree on, and those are the  
points at which easy integration of the various libraries can be made.


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS & UMN MapServer Training

[Howard Butler]

On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into  
the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra  
credibility and marketing reach.


Why?  Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the  
public domain and give them away for free for "extra credibility"?   
What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an  
intensive training session?  IMO, what OTG is doing is a very  
classical business model of Open Source development.  Publishers like  
O'Reilly, Apress, Springer or our own FOSS4G event workshops (did you  
know FOSS4G cleared 100k this year? ;) ) follow this exact model.


The fact that OTG sees an opportunity to do this and has put forth  
effort in developing materials is a signal there's a market there and  
it is an indirect measurement of those projects' success -- not a  
failure of the projects' documentation efforts.  Not everyone has the  
time to go learn all of this stuff on their own or the ability to  
travel to FOSS4G and hope one of the workshops covers what they need.   
I applaud OTG for developing a curriculum and providing training  
services to serve this market, and I think the osgeo-discuss is a  
perfect place for an announcement like this.


Howard
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [postgis-users] A bit off topic, but FOSS GIS clients...

[Howard Butler]

On Jan 2, 2008, at 12:33 PM, Andrea Aime wrote:


Despite that, user must first and foremost understand they are not
the driver.


... unless they pony up with money and/or time.  As Tim said, you are  
either a sink or a source.  As an open source developer, I invest in  
you the user (in money and/or time) by providing documentation (as  
little as possible to optimize my time), answering your questions  
directly, and coding in an effort to create more sources that provide  
me with leverage.  Everyone starts out as a sink.  The project only  
grows by producing more sources than sinks.  If you are identified as  
a sink with no hope of ever turning into a source, you will eventually  
be ignored.


If you want to have a really successful open source experience, you  
must aspire to being a source as quickly as possible.  As a source,  
you will receive differentially more investment (help, code, docs, and  
ideas) from other project principles than if your status as a source  
or sink is unclear.


Use the (and be a) source Luke!

Howard


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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Supporting new projects

[Howard Butler]

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
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[OSGeo-Discuss] Return on Equity

[Howard Butler]

Open source software works because people acting in their own self  
interest have the auxiliary benefit of helping everyone in the  
project.  Report your pet bug, file a patch, add a new feature -- all  
of these things immediately help you, but ultimately help the  
project.  This activity also imparts tangential benefits that are  
very hard to quantify but can be clearly important like personal  
visibility, credibility, and status.


For an open source software project to be viable as a development  
entity, it must be able to bestow these benefits to its individual  
contributors.  Everyone's reasons may be different, but people must  
be able to receive a return on their sweat equity that they put in or  
volunteer effort will not continue to flow into a project.  I think  
that recognition and facilitation of this symbiosis is a blind spot  
for OSGeo. We should be striving to ensure that it can take place  
because we are a volunteer organization whose members have common goals.


Wait a second?  Isn't OSGeo an Autodesk thing with lots of money?   
How is it a "volunteer organization?"


Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer  
efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones.  The OSGeo Journal  
effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's  
efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the  
lights on for developer tools like Subversion/Trac have been  
volunteer enterprises (please help flesh out this list, these are  
only those I am most aware of, I know there have been many others).   
However, I think financial resources, both in the capacity to  
generate sponsorship money and the ability to spend it wisely, are  
what provides the opportunity to set OSGeo apart and provide the  
volunteerism leverage.


When Autodesk came in and helped bootstrap OSGeo, it was fairly clear  
that our financial existence would not be an indefinite expenditure  
-- we would have to exist on our own.  Additionally, to meet 503c3  
requirements, we cannot have a situation where we have a majority  
benefactor as we do now.  We're almost two years down the road into  
bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very  
little.  As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship  
dollars beyond Autodesk are the "targeted development" vehicles like  
those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL.


Another aspect is the sweat equity that has been poured into OSGeo  
over the past year and a half.  Committee members, board members, and  
of course, especially Frank Warmerdam have been spending a lot of  
time bootstrapping.  The opportunity cost of this effort has not been  
insignificant.  I think it is time we take a step back and attempt to  
quantify what the return on that investment has been.  What has the  
existence of OSGeo enabled that could not have happened otherwise?


With some new blood and hopefully new enthusiasm coming to the OSGeo  
board, I would like to propose that we challenge the assumptions of  
the value proposition of OSGeo in an attempt to focus our efforts.   
Other than some minor benefits (or major pains, hah!) of shared  
infrastructure (Subversion/Trac) and the arguably beneficial  
bureaucratic incubation process, what value does OSGeo provide for  
member projects?  What is the elevator pitch, one-sentence value  
proposition to a potential sponsor of OSGeo?  What is the concrete  
return on sweat equity that a volunteer within OSGeo can expect to  
earn?  We need to think about structural issues OSGeo might have that  
hinder our ability to model the Open Source symbiosis described in  
the first paragraphs of this email for those with financial resources  
or those willing to swing an ax or two.


Howard

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