-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Am 26.09.2015 um 17:20 schrieb Darrell Fuhriman: > This is a perfect example. > > All of those are great and wonderful things! The community does great and > wonderful things. That’ s not my point. > > My point is, those activities would happen even if the OSGeo Foundation > disappeared. I’m not questioning whether we have a large and vibrant > community, we do. And we still would. > > My local chapter existed before it was an OSGeo chapter, and we would keep > on having meetings and doing fun and exciting things even without the OSGeo > Foundation.
Same is true for the German chapter. But nevertheless there is need for something more umbrella-like. > Put another way: The OSGeo Foundation needs the Open Source Geospatial > community, but does the Open Source Geospatial community need the OSGeo > Foundation? I don’t see that it does. Here's a case why the Open Source Geospatial community need the OSGeo Foundation: Our company is currently being legally prosecuted as the owner of the deegree.org domain. The claim is that on www.deegree.org there is a commercial offering, but at the same time the web site lacks an imprint (which is legally enforced in Germany for all commercial offerings). Besides the question if some links to companies who provide "professional support" are already a commercial offering, the main point here is, that lat/lon is made responsible for something (providing the server) the company is only doing to support the community. But the prosecutor is saying that lat/lon is accountable here as per the whois entry. We are currently evaluating reactions, together with a lawyer who is experienced in legal aspects of Open Source. But as a more long-term solution I'd say OSGeo should be the legal owner of deegree.org. From my naive legal understanding this would help a lot to get things straight and more transparent to the outside world. This case might be a bit special, but it is a real one - and it might have some larger impact as I am seeing other projects which have a similiar setting and thus might run into the same kind of trouble. Depending on the legal situation in the various countries, of course. My 2 cents, Jens -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlYI8t4ACgkQIaYc4TLqzo/BiwCglneb3vlQPPHw1zsdgfPosCdJ UZcAoJ1OGGkLE8xYYNKVzi0Vt0YSNkI5 =K/cg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss