Should OSGeo be the Ubuntu of Debian of Geospatial?
Ubuntu focuses on USERS by pre-selecting and recommending best of breed
software.
Debian and other Linux distributions focused more on DEVELOPERS by
"letting many flowers bloom".
Consequently, Ubuntu has attracted a large user following and increased
Open Source uptake.
OSGeo priorities should be to USERS first, developers second.
As noted by others, OSGeo human resources are limited and although it
would be nice to help everyone we will be more effective by focusing on
our priorities.
In practice I suggest:
1. Offer OSGeo infrastructure to new projects (low cost to us) but not
much more until the project is stable and reaching incubation quality.
2. Encourage projects to work together and amalgamate libraries rather
than spawning and splitting our developers, user bases, and sponsors.
Starting a new project often has short term gains, but is detrimental to
the community long term. Chris explained this is more detail.
Christopher Schmidt wrote:
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,
--
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
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