Hello Adam and all
Thanks you very much for your encouragement, and sorry for the late
reply. To get peoples informed on the progress, as recommended on the
OSGeo board mailing list we posted our request to the GeoTools mailing
list. They had a non-definitive vote yesterday which resulted in 2
"inclined yes" and 2 "inclined no"
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=29578915).
However they mentioned in their discussion that our project started
before the copyright assignment, which could allow us to proceed anyway.
Nevertheless we prefer of course to get a formal OSGeo approval. The
OSGeo board will listen to the GeoTools point of view, but we have good
hope that they will also stay in agreement with their charter, as we
expected when we signed the copyright assignment to OSGeo (not to GeoTools).
The Eclipse foundation is launching a "LocationTech" group, which seems
similar in goals to OSGeo. The GeoTools, GeoServer and uDig projects are
likely to join that group. Their initial plan was to make an exception
to the Eclipse licensing policy in order to accept GeoTools with its
LGPL license. However our request to re-license our code to Apache
caused some GeoTools members to propose re-licensing GeoTools to
Eclipse. If GeoTools makes such re-licensing, it may facilitate our
request to OSGeo since it is a similarly-permissive license.
The Geotoolkit.org code that we are proposing for Apache SIS
consideration is similar in functionalities to GeoTools, which is why
the first reply to our request on the GeoTools mailing list raised the
question of economical interests. But in theory, the OSGeo foundation is
supposed to make the promotion of open source softwares.
We have been approached by LocationTech for joining them. We had very
long debates and feel more inclined to join Apache. One reason is that
we are not necessarily searching for the biggest community, but rather
for a community sharing similar goals and interests. We work mostly with
scientific research institutes, which sometime have different priorities
than the mass-market ones (e.g. supporting data structured in a
NetCDF-like way has significant influence on the API). While science and
mass-market are not exclusive, the issue is sometime just a matter of focus.
However we are considering to propose hosting GeoAPI on LocationTech. If
the Eclipse foundation accepts, GeoAPI would still copyrighted by OGC
under OGC license (which is BSD-like), milestones could be released by
LocationTech but normative releases would still have to go through the
OGC standardisation process. If Eclipse accepts, GeoAPI could be a glue
between OGC, Apache and Eclipse where some collaboration happen.
I will come back with more information has I get some.
Martin Desruisseaux
Le 21/07/12 14:46, Adam Estrada a écrit :
I've been following this thread over the past week and gotta say that it's very
much appreciated that you are so willing to move your project to Apache. Thanks
and I look forward to working with you more on SIS.
