On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 03:08:12PM -0500, Bob Basques wrote: > Chris, > > Ahh crap, I knew this was going to happen, the questions I mean. :c) I > can continue with the detail offline if you like too . . .
My statements, though made about your specific case, were really more of a general statement about any project seeking to enter into a space with a large following for another open source project. I feel that the incubation process should, as part of its process, seek to ensure that a project is sustainable long term -- and one of the most important questions in that is "Can the community behind this project sustain it?" In the case where a project has a small, but loyal, following, that may be true even when a larger player in the field is taking up the majority of the mindshare. It can also be true where a project has a different approach to a problem -- FDO and OGR seem (from the outside) to be solving many of the same data access issues. However, after learning a bit about the FDO model, I can see that it has a significantly different approach than OGR. Clearly FDO has a significant user-base through its use in Autodesk's products, so I understand why having both would be beneficial to the community. It's about viability. It can come in many sources -- a large, mostly silent community is not always better than a small, vibrant community. Evaluating community viability is hard -- but I think it's the purpose of the entire OSGeo incubation process, and being able to ask the hard questions of a project before it enters incubation seems like a good way to head off at the pass too many attmepts to reimplement the same things. No clue how that applies here -- just rambling, as usual :) But did want to toss in my $0.04 (That's $0.02 CDN these days.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
