Hi Vincent, Thanks to you too and great to talk to you! Thanks for reaching out.
My replies are inline below: On Aug 13, 2012, at 1:34 AM, Geomatys.com wrote: > Hello Chris, > > First of all, nice to talk to you. > > I remained in the background those past weeks letting Martin solve IP > discussions with OSGEO, but talked a lot with him about a possible > collaboration with the SIS project and how to solve things regarding the > difficult relations we've got with the GeoTools community. > > For the a - b - c - d points, I will let Martin and other developers from > Geotk/Geomatys talk with SIS community. But for the last point, as far I'm > concerned I'll give my point of view, and bring some informations regarding > our activity linked to Geotk. > > At first we started this fork in 2008 in order to solve some problems we > encountered with GeoTools and it's consequences for our activity. Since that > time we spent Martin's day work to rework all the packages from Geotk (core) > and extended this work to Metadata NetCDF and so on ... > In paralel, we benefit from funded jobs to rewrite packages after packages, a > lot of GeoTools source code hosted on the pending part of the project. Today, > only 10 or 20% of historical code remains, and as we're now more than 15 > people working on it, it'll be not to hard to complete this work. Ah, thanks that's an important piece of history for you to share. Thanks on that. > > Based on this toolkit, we've created a SDI framework called Constellation-SDI > that offers WMS, WMTS, CS-W, WFS, WCS, SOS and WPS services. We've developed > a geospatial catalog (MDWeb), a web client framework JSF based (MapFaces), > and a desktop client (Puzzle-GIS). Wow, OK, cool sounds pretty comprehensive! > > All those project are used to develop our customers solutions, and in some > cases they've some teams working internally to extend its projects. > > That said, it seems clear that we couldn't give up immediately Geotk > developement without putting Geomatys in a dangerous situation. Sure, gotcha. And based on the below it seems like you have deduced a plan that is agreeable on the Geomatys side and the software you guys are supporting, and that seems workable from the Apache SIS side. I think the faster and sooner you and your team come over to Apache SIS, the quicker you can retire the GeoTK stuff. > > After some thought, we considered that the best way to migrate our projects > without disturbing too much our activity was to start with the core modules, > and when this task is achieved, we could easily replace Geotk-core by SIS > Core. After that we could continue with the pending part of Geotk. One of the > benefits of this migration method is that during the migration of the core > part, we should have finished the rewrite of the remaining GeoTools packages > in the Geotk-Pending repository. > Sure that sounds great. > To follow this plan, and to keep coherent with the licenses, we will have to > migrate all our code from LGPL to Apache2. LGPL 2.1 isn't compliant with > Apache License, and we couldn't use SIS-Core with Geotk pending as it is now. Sure, got it. > > Last but not least, by doing that way, we can take the time to work together > and test if we're compatible enough to create a long term community all > together (on that point I'm very confident regarding our common objectives). +1, and me too RE: our common objectives and the ability to work together! > This point is for me really important because we've worked hard to reach our > independence form the GeoTools Project, and migrating progressively from > Geotk to SIS allows us to minify the risk of failure if something goes wrong. +1. > I do not hide that I'm a bit worried by the few exchange on the list > concerning GeoTools and the dual-licensing stuff. We've not spent so much > energy to have a clear separation between the two projects, that it will be > hard to accept for us if we've to deal again with this community through the > SIS project. Well I can't control what folks send to the list, but I can pretty much tell you that I'm interested in the "Apache way" and in promoting folks that abide by it, and work within our community. So far, so good, and I appreciate your contributions here. > > So, to answer clearly the questions bellow : > >> e. As an Apache SIS mentor, my question to you is: >> - do you anticipate closing down GeoTK at some point? > Yes >> If so, when. > when the core and pending part of Geotk will be fully migrated to SIS +1 > >> If not, why? > Not if during the migration process we encounter some community problems, > keeping us safe to continue our business. > >> I'm not a fan of co-developing projects, and communities here are the >> in the GeoTK community going to come over here to the ASF and Apache SIS >> project, or will work continue over at GeoTK? I would hope the answer is >> that work *would not* continue at GeoTK and that you guys would come >> create issues of some code, or even replicated code over here at the ASF, >> being released and developed somewhere else (e.g., GeoTK.org). > I'm not a big fan of duplicated work too and a convergence toward a single > community is for me the goal we've to reach. +1 >> ASF. More so than the code, the community is what we care about. Are others >> here. It reduces friction, reduces duplication of development, and doesn't > The most important thing that persuaded us to contact you is the community. > Today we can migrate the major part of our Geotk code to Apache2 and continue > working as before, but we were looking for a scientific geospatial community > to work with, and I guess we found it. That sounds great VIncent and thank you for your thoughtful replies. Glad to have you on list and working with Apache SIS! Cheers, Chris ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.a.mattm...@nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
