Dear all, As most of you will be aware, we have been preparing a fork of the gvSIG sources under a new, more agile and open project umbrella for some time. As of today, we would like to announce the inception of gvSIG CE (Community Edition), and invite you to participate in maintaining and developing it. This is an early announcement, to be followed soon by a message to a broader audience. For those of you who have not been following the behind-the-scenes discussion, here is a summary of the motivations behind this move: * Language: At this point, gvSIG is well known in Spain and Latin America but less so in non-Spanish speaking countries. The gvSIG team has made a commendable effort to produce English documentation, but that is not enough, as much of the critical communication is still handled in Spanish. By contrast, gvSIG CE will be an English-speaking project for a more international community. * Openness: Open source projects grow through collaboration between project teams. In the case of gvSIG, this concerns projects such as NavTable, SEXTANTE, GRASS GIS and the GDAL/OGR driver libraries. For this collaboration to work well, it is crucial to have a non-hierarchical, transparent and open development and decision making process, where all interested parties are equally informed and involved. * Agility: While all of us value stable and well-documented software, most of us value working and available software even more. We believe the best strategy is to get code released and have it tested and patched using a simple, agile process that does not waste coders' time. We wish to make developing for gvSIG CE an enjoyable and barrier-free experience. * This project is not intended to compete with or replace the original gvSIG (http://www.gvsig.org). We simply wish to create a new platform for all those who can identify with the motivations listed above. It is our hope that both projects will benefit from a lively exchange of ideas and code CSGIS, OA Digital, the German Archaeological Institute, the SEXTANTE project and Bern University, among others, already support the gvSIG CE initiative, and believe it the right decision to make gvSIG more international and attract new contributions and sources of funding. We hope that we will have your support, as well. We plan to base the first release of gvSIG CE on the code base of gvSIG OADE, plus the patches and improvements in the CIT SVN for gvSIG 1.11 (and perhaps 1.12), plus any other contributed patches and new features. Another focus for immediate work will lie on updating the SEXTANTE and GRASS interfaces. The source code for gvSIG OADE can now be found on our new Sourceforge project site: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gvsigce. A preliminary wiki can be found here: http://gvsigce.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Much work lies ahead of us now, which is why we are writing to you at this time, before the official announcement for gvSIG CE, which we plan to send to a wider group of people as soon as we have the basic infrastructure in place. We are looking for people to help us design and administer the web pages, improve documentation and web content, provide testing and feedback of the software, contribute ideas and funding -- and of course produce great code! If you are interested in collaborating on one of these or any other aspects, please sign up to our community mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gvsigce-community to get in touch with us. If you are willing to work on any part of gvSIG CE, you will need a (free) Sourceforge account. If you don't have one yet, sign up here: https://sourceforge.net/user/registration. Then let us know your Sourceforge Username, tell us a little about yourself and how you would like to contribute -- and become part of the project team! For the gvSIG CE project: Benjamin Ducke (http://oadigital.net, http://www.dainst.de) Jose Canalejo & Ruth Schönbuchner (http://csgis.de)
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