Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org?
I think a commercial support section would be a great idea, but as others have said, managing it can be tricky. Not all users know how to analyze the list archives to find the best person to help them with a specific problem, so this support page would help both the users and the service providers to find each other. I think David's suggestion of self-registration with a flag for committers and some objective measures of contributions/participation readily available may be the best way to go. Daniel On 14-08-21 3:48 PM, David Strip wrote: 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. http://www.infoworld.com/t/open-source-software/how-crack-open-source-community-248352?source=IFWNLE_nlt_stradev_2014-08-19 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 http://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 ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev -- Daniel Morissette T: +1 418-696-5056 #201 http://www.mapgears.com/ Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000 ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org?
Charta is interested to be listed as experienced provider if gdal.org will ever add info about commercial support. Nevertheless, I think this item has to receive more attention, considering at least: * the license of GDAL. Using MIT license means being expecially open to commercial usage. I don't know if this is really consequential with selecting a group of commercial providers instead of being agnostic about usage of the code and technology created (I don't agree with this, but...); * usually support means choice between several tools and technologies, being a core contributor could mean some bias about recurring to a specific tool. Being listed as such could become a double-edged sword; * any evaluation aobut support should be based on the help provided to the user and not about the contribution to the project. The client shoud be able to choose if he needs broad or focused support, if he needs new developments or better integration and so on. Listing experiences or specialisation (geodatabases, remote sensing and so on) could be more useful. Even's case is noteworthy, because he is more than a Core contributor, but a project leader for GDAL. When his affiliation to École des Mines changed to his own company, Spatialys, I thought this was a very good move because he could more easily provide consulting services to commercial entities. Maybe his visibility as a prominent person in this community is already warranted, I understand that his proposal is addressed to others, but I think gdal-dev is about developing, although the list provides a lot of help to users, is this the right place? c On Thu, Aug 20, 2014 at 10:02:35 PM, Even Rouault wrote: Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:02:35 +0200 From: Even Rouault even.roua...@spatialys.com To: gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org Subject: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org ? Message-ID: 201408202202.36022.even.roua...@spatialys.com Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Hi, I'm wondering if there would be a concensus and interest to add a Commercial support section on gdal.org. A number of OSGeo projects have such page (see [1]), so that wouldn't be completely awkward to have one for GDAL as well. The OSGeo Service provider database reference 137 companies/individuals that have registered themselves as providing GDAL support ([2]) ! Pretty cool, but I'm wondering how a user not familiar with the project could effectively use that list to identify core contributors from casual advanced users. If we agree for adding a Commercial support section, the question is : on which criteria do we accept an organization/individual to be listed in the section ? We would want them to be as most objective and non debatable as possible. A simple criterion could be anyone who has commit rights (in trunk, not just in a sandbox or customer branch). There are currently 56 SVN committers. That could be strengthened with a minimum number of commits/lines changed during a period, but we perhaps don't need that level of complexity. We could possibly also extend that to entities that provide public support to users through gdal-dev or other public forums (gis.stackexchange, others?). Other suggestions ? Should we distinguish several categories of actors ? - QGIS makes a division between Core contributors vs Contributors. GeoServer has Core contributors, Experienced providers and Additional services (the last one is populated on service provider request). - On the other side, deegree, Geomoose or Geotools simply list them in a single section. The answer likely depends on the number of organizations that would be listed (I guess below 10 we don't need much structure). The difficulty here would be to establish the categories and criteria. So, could entities interested in being listed reply to this email so we can have a better idea of how many would be listed, and if we need more stricter criteria or several categories ? As far as I'm concerned, Spatialys would be interested. Best regards, Even [1] Non exhaustive list of OSGeo projects with a commercial support section : http://geoserver.org/support/ http://www.geomoose.org/info/commercial_support.html http://docs.geotools.org/latest/userguide/welcome/support.html http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/GettingSupport http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html [2] OSGeo Service Provider catalog with entities declaring GDAL expertise : http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1MUL_TECH[]=00013 -- Spatialys - Geospatial professional services http://www.spatialys.com -- -- Carlo A. Bertelli Charta servizi e
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org?
Adding a support section like some other OSGeo projects is a good idea (in my opinion). This is a way for people to use the project webpage to find those who are most substantially contributing to the project and know the most about GDAL/OGR. On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 5:46 AM, berte...@charta.acme.com wrote: Charta is interested to be listed as experienced provider if gdal.org will ever add info about commercial support. Nevertheless, I think this item has to receive more attention, considering at least: * the license of GDAL. Using MIT license means being expecially open to commercial usage. I don't know if this is really consequential with selecting a group of commercial providers instead of being agnostic about usage of the code and technology created (I don't agree with this, but...); * usually support means choice between several tools and technologies, being a core contributor could mean some bias about recurring to a specific tool. Being listed as such could become a double-edged sword; If you are looking for GDAL/OGR support (on the gdal.org web page) you have already made your technology choice. If you are looking for support in selecting a technology you should not be looking on gdal.org but rather collecting references or otherwise doing research on appropriate support in whatever domain you're in. gdal.org is not the the proper place to look for support on javascript libraries or other non-GDAL/OGR topics. Someone may be better off with advice to use something other than GDAL/OGR but gdal.org is not the place to get that advice (the people and companies listed there may give that advice if approached but they would best know what is out of the GDAL/OGR scope). * any evaluation aobut support should be based on the help provided to the user and not about the contribution to the project. The client shoud be able to choose if he needs broad or focused support, if he needs new developments or better integration and so on. Listing experiences or specialisation (geodatabases, remote sensing and so on) could be more useful. A prudent customer might evaluate support by referrals and reviews based on help provided to the user but gdal.org is in no place to evaluate that. gdal.org is certainly in a place to evaluate and recommend those who have a history of competently contributing to the project (tickets, patches, commits, emails correctly answered, relevant presentations at FOSS4G, etc). The OSGeo Service providers directory, http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1MUL_TECH[0]=00013 already provides a mechanism for self listing anything the person listing wants. This remains a valuable resource for researching support options but gives no indication of who is competently contributing to the project. The PostGIS support page lists focus area of support, http://postgis.net/support Best regards, Eli Even's case is noteworthy, because he is more than a Core contributor, but a project leader for GDAL. When his affiliation to École des Mines changed to his own company, Spatialys, I thought this was a very good move because he could more easily provide consulting services to commercial entities. Maybe his visibility as a prominent person in this community is already warranted, I understand that his proposal is addressed to others, but I think gdal-dev is about developing, although the list provides a lot of help to users, is this the right place? c On Thu, Aug 20, 2014 at 10:02:35 PM, Even Rouault wrote: Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:02:35 +0200 From: Even Rouault even.roua...@spatialys.com To: gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org Subject: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org ? Message-ID: 201408202202.36022.even.roua...@spatialys.com Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Hi, I'm wondering if there would be a concensus and interest to add a Commercial support section on gdal.org. A number of OSGeo projects have such page (see [1]), so that wouldn't be completely awkward to have one for GDAL as well. The OSGeo Service provider database reference 137 companies/individuals that have registered themselves as providing GDAL support ([2]) ! Pretty cool, but I'm wondering how a user not familiar with the project could effectively use that list to identify core contributors from casual advanced users. If we agree for adding a Commercial support section, the question is : on which criteria do we accept an organization/individual to be listed in the section ? We would want them to be as most objective and non debatable as possible. A simple criterion could be anyone who has commit rights (in trunk, not just in a sandbox or customer branch). There are currently 56 SVN committers. That could be strengthened with a minimum number of commits/lines changed during a period, but we perhaps don't need that
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org?
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 On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Eli Adam ea...@co.lincoln.or.us wrote: Adding a support section like some other OSGeo projects is a good idea (in my opinion). This is a way for people to use the project webpage to find those who are most substantially contributing to the project and know the most about GDAL/OGR. On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 5:46 AM, berte...@charta.acme.com wrote: Charta is interested to be listed as experienced provider if gdal.org will ever add info about commercial support. Nevertheless, I think this item has to receive more attention, considering at least: * the license of GDAL. Using MIT license means being expecially open to commercial usage. I don't know if this is really consequential with selecting a group of commercial providers instead of being agnostic about usage of the code and technology created (I don't agree with this, but...); * usually support means choice between several tools and technologies, being a core contributor could mean some bias about recurring to a specific tool. Being listed as such could become a double-edged sword; If you are looking for GDAL/OGR support (on the gdal.org web page) you have already made your technology choice. If you are looking for support in selecting a technology you should not be looking on gdal.org but rather collecting references or otherwise doing research on appropriate support in whatever domain you're in. gdal.org is not the the proper place to look for support on javascript libraries or other non-GDAL/OGR topics. Someone may be better off with advice to use something other than GDAL/OGR but gdal.org is not the place to get that advice (the people and companies listed there may give that advice if approached but they would best know what is out of the GDAL/OGR scope). * any evaluation aobut support should be based on the help provided to the user and not about the contribution to the project. The client shoud be able to choose if he needs broad or focused support, if he needs new developments or better integration and so on. Listing experiences or specialisation (geodatabases, remote sensing and so on) could be more useful. A prudent customer might evaluate support by referrals and reviews based on help provided to the user but gdal.org is in no place to evaluate that. gdal.org is certainly in a place to evaluate and recommend those who have a history of competently contributing to the project (tickets, patches, commits, emails correctly answered, relevant presentations at FOSS4G, etc). The OSGeo Service providers directory, http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1MUL_TECH[0]=00013 already provides a mechanism for self listing anything the person listing wants. This remains a valuable resource for researching support options but gives no indication of who is competently contributing to the project. The PostGIS support page lists focus area of support, http://postgis.net/support Best regards, Eli Even's case is noteworthy, because he is more than a Core contributor, but a project leader for GDAL. When his affiliation to École des Mines changed to his own company, Spatialys, I thought this was a very good move because he could more easily provide consulting services to commercial entities. Maybe his visibility as a prominent person in this community is already warranted, I understand that his proposal is addressed to others, but I think gdal-dev is about developing, although the list provides a lot of help to users, is this the right place? c On Thu, Aug 20, 2014 at 10:02:35 PM, Even Rouault wrote: Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:02:35 +0200 From: Even Rouault even.roua...@spatialys.com To: gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org Subject: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org?
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 ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org ?
Even, I suspect most companies providing commercial support for GDAL are related to one or more committers, so it might be reasonable to let the committers to propose a company to be listed (by describing the support they can provide) and probably call for a vote on it. (just my 2 cents) Best regards, Tamas 2014-08-20 22:02 GMT+02:00 Even Rouault even.roua...@spatialys.com: Hi, I'm wondering if there would be a concensus and interest to add a Commercial support section on gdal.org. A number of OSGeo projects have such page (see [1]), so that wouldn't be completely awkward to have one for GDAL as well. The OSGeo Service provider database reference 137 companies/individuals that have registered themselves as providing GDAL support ([2]) ! Pretty cool, but I'm wondering how a user not familiar with the project could effectively use that list to identify core contributors from casual advanced users. If we agree for adding a Commercial support section, the question is : on which criteria do we accept an organization/individual to be listed in the section ? We would want them to be as most objective and non debatable as possible. A simple criterion could be anyone who has commit rights (in trunk, not just in a sandbox or customer branch). There are currently 56 SVN committers. That could be strengthened with a minimum number of commits/lines changed during a period, but we perhaps don't need that level of complexity. We could possibly also extend that to entities that provide public support to users through gdal-dev or other public forums (gis.stackexchange, others?). Other suggestions ? Should we distinguish several categories of actors ? - QGIS makes a division between Core contributors vs Contributors. GeoServer has Core contributors, Experienced providers and Additional services (the last one is populated on service provider request). - On the other side, deegree, Geomoose or Geotools simply list them in a single section. The answer likely depends on the number of organizations that would be listed (I guess below 10 we don't need much structure). The difficulty here would be to establish the categories and criteria. So, could entities interested in being listed reply to this email so we can have a better idea of how many would be listed, and if we need more stricter criteria or several categories ? As far as I'm concerned, Spatialys would be interested. Best regards, Even [1] Non exhaustive list of OSGeo projects with a commercial support section : http://geoserver.org/support/ http://www.geomoose.org/info/commercial_support.html http://docs.geotools.org/latest/userguide/welcome/support.html http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/GettingSupport http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html [2] OSGeo Service Provider catalog with entities declaring GDAL expertise : http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1MUL_TECH[]=00013 -- Spatialys - Geospatial professional services http://www.spatialys.com ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
Re: [gdal-dev] Adding a Commercial support section on gdal.org ?
Even, I am not yet a commiter on SVN, but I agree with Tamas that allowing any commiters would be a great. I personally think listing supporting companies with an opensource project is a great way to build more support and trust in the project. Thanks, Blake On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Tamas Szekeres szeker...@gmail.com wrote: Even, I suspect most companies providing commercial support for GDAL are related to one or more committers, so it might be reasonable to let the committers to propose a company to be listed (by describing the support they can provide) and probably call for a vote on it. (just my 2 cents) Best regards, Tamas 2014-08-20 22:02 GMT+02:00 Even Rouault even.roua...@spatialys.com: Hi, I'm wondering if there would be a concensus and interest to add a Commercial support section on gdal.org. A number of OSGeo projects have such page (see [1]), so that wouldn't be completely awkward to have one for GDAL as well. The OSGeo Service provider database reference 137 companies/individuals that have registered themselves as providing GDAL support ([2]) ! Pretty cool, but I'm wondering how a user not familiar with the project could effectively use that list to identify core contributors from casual advanced users. If we agree for adding a Commercial support section, the question is : on which criteria do we accept an organization/individual to be listed in the section ? We would want them to be as most objective and non debatable as possible. A simple criterion could be anyone who has commit rights (in trunk, not just in a sandbox or customer branch). There are currently 56 SVN committers. That could be strengthened with a minimum number of commits/lines changed during a period, but we perhaps don't need that level of complexity. We could possibly also extend that to entities that provide public support to users through gdal-dev or other public forums (gis.stackexchange, others?). Other suggestions ? Should we distinguish several categories of actors ? - QGIS makes a division between Core contributors vs Contributors. GeoServer has Core contributors, Experienced providers and Additional services (the last one is populated on service provider request). - On the other side, deegree, Geomoose or Geotools simply list them in a single section. The answer likely depends on the number of organizations that would be listed (I guess below 10 we don't need much structure). The difficulty here would be to establish the categories and criteria. So, could entities interested in being listed reply to this email so we can have a better idea of how many would be listed, and if we need more stricter criteria or several categories ? As far as I'm concerned, Spatialys would be interested. Best regards, Even [1] Non exhaustive list of OSGeo projects with a commercial support section : http://geoserver.org/support/ http://www.geomoose.org/info/commercial_support.html http://docs.geotools.org/latest/userguide/welcome/support.html http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/GettingSupport http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html [2] OSGeo Service Provider catalog with entities declaring GDAL expertise : http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1MUL_TECH[]=00013 -- Spatialys - Geospatial professional services http://www.spatialys.com ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev ___ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
