Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Return on Equity

[Sean Gillies]

Dave Patton wrote:

Howard Butler wrote:

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.


There has certainly been a lot of volunteer effort by the organizers
of the FOSS4G 2007 conference, and the efforts of those volunteers will
continue through to the end of the conference, when the ball gets
picked up by the organizers of next year's conference.

The actual dollar number that you come up with will depend on various
factors, but you can argue that both the 500+ registrants for the
conference, and the conference's Sponsors/Exhibitors are all
contributing financially to OSGeo.

The Sponsors presumably wouldn't be spending money on the conference
if they didn't see value for their companies. Maybe it's an opportunity
for the new board to frame some questions at their meeting the day
before the conference, and to ask those questions of Sponsors during
the conference, to try and facilitate future opportunities for OSGeo
sponsorship by a variety of corporations, in a variety of ways.



I'm contributing financially to OSGeo? How much? I don't remember 
reading anywhere on the conference website that the event is about OSGeo 
revenue.


Sean

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] a SOAP bubble

[Sean Gillies]

Jo Walsh wrote:

dear all,

The Draft Implementing Rules for Network Services for geodata 
as part of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (INSPIRE)
are going to be published before too long, and when they are, 
they will mandate SOAP for interfacing with all OGC web services.


'What?' one cries. 'SOAP [...]'. And the poor European Commission
are going to have to listen to a lot of opinions about what a good
and what a bad thing this is for people writing geographic information
software and trying to get public authorities in Europe to use it. 


It would be so great to collect some kind of real numbers looking
outside the GI domain even. Like back when there was a SOAP bubble
a few years ago and Google, Amazon et al ran parallel SOAP and REST
style services. Google dropped SOAP for GMaps. Could we get those
kinds of numbers? Is anyone in GIS really supporting SOAP enough that
one could get comparative realworld numbers? 

I would also be really interested in getting impact assessment from 
client software of an change like this - like SOAP support would be a

big deal for an intentionally light-footprint package like OpenLayers.

Any thoughts at all welcome here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SOAP


jo


http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/whySoapSucks.html

From Nelson Minar, who worked on several SOAP services for Google.

Sean

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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Liability protection project - call for participants

[Sean Gillies]

Yes. Thanks, Frank. I love the idea of Eben Moglen defending my software.

Sean


Allan Doyle wrote:
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, it's a topic that has renewed 
relevance.


 From the sound of it, OSGeo itself has too many eggs in its basket to 
risk having them broken by providing a shield. But that ought not stop 
geo-foss developers from either joining up with Bruce's idea or from 
setting up a geo-clone of that idea.


Ideally, the legal issues would only have to be worked out once, and 
everyone who wanted could join the shield. There's nothing inherently 
different about geo in this case, is there?


Allan

On May 14, 2007, at 23:32, Frank Warmerdam wrote:



Folks,

Bruce Perens is a luminary in the open source world, and known as a
founder of the Debian project, and author of the Free Software
Definition - a foundational document for the concept of OSI approved
open source licenses.

Bruce Perens wrote:
 A long time ago we planned for SPI to protect Debian developers from
 liability connected with their development of Free Software. That never
 came to fruition. With the sword-rattling going on by various patent
 holders, it's  a goal even more worth carrying out today.

 Some of us have homes, and other property that we would rather not 
place

 at risk of any lawsuit connected with our Free Software activities. The
 way to do that is to act as a volunteer on the behalf of a non-profit
 corporation, with the corporation assuming your liability. It is
 possible to insure you against those risks, but it's much more 
expensive

 - potentially 1.5 to 2.5 percent of your net worth per year per member.
 It's better to put the risk in the lap of an entity that doesn't own
 anything. We can potentially do it at zero cost to the member that way.

 There is a downside. If you work on behalf of such an entity, you would
 have to agree to act at their direction, which means acting responsbily
 on their behalf, by not doing stupid stuff that obviously increases the
 corporation's risk of being sued. This doesn't really have to do with
 practical software, but with what some consider freedom-of-speech 
issues

 like obscentity or hate speech. For that reason, this would be strictly
 opt-in. It would not be directly associated with SPI or Debian, because
 we could never get all of the DDs to agree about this, and because SPI
 owns property that we do not want to expose to liability. Copyrights of
 software produced would be assigned to a non-profit like FSF or SPI*

 I am asking for current free software authors in the United States who
 would be interested in being protected from liability, and would 
join me
 in a request to the Software Freedom Law Center to assist us by 
creating

 such an entity. If you would like to do that, please reply to me at
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Further discussion will be carried out separately
 from SPI and Debian lists.

Thanks

Bruce

 * There should also be limits on how much software a single non-profit
 has in its risk pool, this is a good question for SFLC.

At the time it was founded, OSGeo also had a goal to provide legal
resources, and perhaps assume legal liability for developers of OSGeo
project.  This is not a role that OSGeo has worked to address since
founding, and it is unclear how much liability it would be willing to
assume.

I've asked Bruce for more information on his efforts, either with an
eye towards OSGeo fulfilling this role of legal liability shield for
developers, or possibly with the idea of addressing this via some
separate entity such as the one he envisages establishing.

I'm interested in others thoughts on the importance of the role of
legal liability shield.  Such thoughts would be well expressed
here on OSGeo discuss.

Bruce is also interested in other open source software developers
expressing interest in his effort to help justify forming a corporation.
You can contact him as noted above.

Best regards,
-+-- 

I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, 
http://osgeo.org


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--Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



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