Hi Jody, Emily, Everyone
Please forgive me for top-posting. This update didn't fit in any one
specific point in the thread but was relevant to the discussion.
Things are going extremely well for the Location industry working group
(IWG) formation. In May, the Location IWG will be presented to the
Eclipse Foundation board. If the plan is approved including the details
re: a distinct name/brand/logo for our Location group, we'll have what
we need to proceed.
Regarding licensing, the way the IWG is structured will let us
re-distribute LGPL components such as Geotools for example. It is our
hope that LGPL be the exception rather than the norm (i.e. EPL, MIT,
BSD) since there are clauses in the LGPL that trigger more than a few
companies to prohibit re-use of LGPL components including key
participating members.
On the company side of things there are roughly 20 organizations
participating already. This list is growing significantly each meeting
which is nice to see. A handful of companies have already committed to
launch the group. A few more may join between now and the launch. Of the
initial group, Oracle & IBM have tentatively agreed to provide the
inaugural co-chairs for the group.
All of this is a long winded say that we're now ready to push ahead and
start the work to bring uDig to this exciting new forge & group.
If you're interested in more information, our temporary landing page is
here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Location
I would be thrilled to talk to anyone who's interested in hosting a
project in this facility or talking about how participation in this IWG
can benefit their organization.
Andrew
p.s. As Jody noted, many of us have been involved with OSGeo for some
time. I'm happy to report we've been having constructive conversations
with members of the OSGeo board about how we can collaborate. For what
it's worth, we're also talking with OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and many
other organizations about similar synergies.
On 04/25/2012 10:24 PM, Jody Garnett wrote:
TLDR: Jody is alive. We have some organisation here
<http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Eclipse+Foundation> and
a bit of work to do (but the Eclipse Foundation seems to be ready to
help out on the hard part). Please join the Eclipse Location Working
group (even if just to lurk).
Jody
Still the question holds: who is going to start the process of getting
uDig to eclipse. I think we would need to have at least a couple of
members of the communtiy to assure presence and contribution. Did I
loose another email thread?
Perhaps - We did start the process in December :-) However it is going
a bit slow as we need to ask eclipse to be comfortable with us using
LGPL license libraries (JTS and GeoTools). We can probably get an
exception for that by demonstrating how valuable they are and that we
don't have the capacity to rewrite them…
Other then that I think we are waiting to hear back from Andrew and
Andrew is waiting to hear back from us.
I am keen to start :-) As such I would like to fill in our RFC and get
a good list of tasks going to capture the work involved so we can
start to round up resources.
The page is here (is this what you missed?):
- http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Eclipse+Foundation
On a separate topic - I would like to see uDig taking part in the
eclipse "location" working group; however to date all the meetings
have been at 3am for me. I would like to ask that someone else from
the uDig community attend these (or we can ask Andrew to hold two
meetings and cary the minuets over between them).
Andrew has a bit of a balancing act as representative of both Eclipse
and OSGeo Foundations. To be fair so do I since I the OSGeo incubation
chair. We can muddle along; but just a reminder to play nice as we all
have the same goals.
We have also failed to contact Refractions (although we have asked
Emily to check in with Refractions Management). Andrew you may wish to
use Emily as a useful Refractions contact until we can arrange a
better introduction - she is CCed on this email.
Other things in the mix:
- I would not mind changing the uDig license to EPL 1.0 to simplify
our license story. Our reasons for not using the license were only
based on the popularity of LGPL at the time (and the eclipse common
license at the time was not yet established as a viable investment
target).
- We have a smooth working relationship with GeoTools (a policy of
copying code over when possible to share. We would need to amend this
to cover a license transition from EPL->LGPL perhaps a formal letter
in our docs would work. GeoServer has a similar arrangement (ask on
the email list and get approval) for the much harder GPL->LGPL
transition so we have working policy model to crib from.
- We are getting very fond of git; and github in particular. While I
don't mind continuing to persue github pages I would like to focus on
static content hosting; so we can take our docs with us and not get
tied into their fun little content theme scrubber thing. Eclipse now
has some procedures in place with respect to git. While github
documentation has been a key success factor for the project - that
limit is less damaging as git becomes the defacto technology. More
damaging is the "if it is not on github the project must be canceled"
attitude that has already caused trouble for GeoTools and GeoServer :-)
Sure everybody can join. I am not afraid of the fact that too many
people would help. It is the other way round :)
So if such a process is started, I think there should be a minimum
number of developers that donate time to that process. Else I am just
wondering who would do the work.
I am very keen; I want to talk with Andrew and determine how much work
there is and boil it down into tasks before asking the project to
accept the RFC proposal.
This thought comes from the fact that when uDig needs to be released
and tested, very very few people are around.
The automated maven / tycho build is helping a lot with this :-)
Indeed I think that is one of the most amazing things the Eclipse
Foundation has done recently.
I would like some help on the release cycle front - as it cuts out my
time to work on QA and new ideas.
Well, the move towards
eclipse looks way bigger to me than that, and without some
coordination I am just wondering how that should work?
We have a small bit of coordination already started; thus far there
have been only two "common" concerns.
- After being on the incubation committee I was concerned about the
review processing being a lot of work - strangely enough this appears
to be the part where the eclipse foundation is ready to step in and
help (yay!)
- The eclipse foundation has a "1.0 release" from a fresh codebase
policy which apparently is often a cause of contention. Since we lost
our history moving to gitourious we are rather relaxed about this one.
Jody
--
*Andrew Ross*
Director, Ecosystems
Eclipse Foundation <http://eclipse.org>
Twitter: @42aross <http://twitter.com/42aross>
Mobile: 1-613-614-5772
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