Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a "Commercial support" section on gdal.org?

[David Strip]

As Frank  wrote, this is a slippery issue. Personally I could be comfortable with anything from self-registration to the highly selective approach described by Frank. To me, the important issue is making clear to a reader of the list what exactly the list means and how to use that to interpret the skills of those on the list. One way to use this list is as a reward to significant contributors to project. This would tend to point to those most familiar with the internals of the project, as well as having a broad commitment to the project and the notion of an open source community.  Of course this requires a voting process, presumably by the PSC, which can be burdensome and stressful, as Frank notes. While I have found this project community to be generally welcoming, open source projects somewhat deservedly have a reputation for being insular and hard to crack. (For a great read, check out this article. Worth reading just for a remarkably intolerant response from Linus Torvalds on the merits of C++). A vetted list of names carries an implied endorsement, which is valuable to the reader, but carries a risk for the committee that chooses the list. (I'm not talking risk in the legal sense, though that could occur, I suppose. More the reflection on how the community chooses who to include or exclude.) As the other extreme, we allow anyone to register and hopefully provide some guidance in how to choose amongst them. For example, suggest that people search the archives of this mailing list to see how often the consultant participates. Put a star next to names who have commit privileges, perhaps the date the achieved this status, so you can tell how long they've been active. There are many ways to objectively identify the stronger contributors while remaining open. I am tempted to suggest even allowing endorsements, but policing that against spam, abuse, fraud is probably more work than it's worth. My choice leans to an open list of self-registrants with some objective measures of their participation, but I'll probably be content with whatever the community decides. On 8/21/2014 11:02 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote: Folks, This is a somewhat sticky area, which is why I started just with just the self-registration mechanism on the OSGeo site in the past. A scenario that I could support would be a section somewhat like the postgis.net support list where being added to it needs to be voted on by the PSC.  My criteria as a PSC member would be:  - The organization has made significant contributions to the project (in code, docs, etc)  - The organization has staff that I personally know to be competent GDAL/OGR developers.  It is a slippery sort of thing of course.  Subjective, and I would hate to be in the situation where I'm having to vote against an addition.  If we were to pursue this I actually think an RFC with an initial list of entries, and some general principles would be appropriate (though additions wouldn't need an RFC - just a up/down vote). My perspective when consulting was that being active on the mailing list, and noting in my email signature that I was available for consulting was enough to give me some profile with those looking for someone. PS. as happy customer of Even's (at Planet Labs) I can strongly endorse him as a consultant! Best regards, Frank

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