MUM2: Day 3
MapServer Closing Session
Much time was spent discussing the idea of project governance. One
of the things that is frequently said in the Python community is
the idea of “What if Guido gets hit by a bus?”. There is starting
to be some idea or questioning in the MapServer community about
where the project might go if Steve or DM Solutions were to go away.
Frank chimed in an said that he picked up maintenance of Proj.4
because the original developer retired, and he needed it. He expected
that the same thing would happen if Steve were hit by a bus.
On the other hand, there was a lot of independent developer (those not
affiliated with a larger company that have built their business around
MapServer) support for something like a MapServer Foundation. The
thinking there is that small to medium amounts of money could be used
to fund the general development of the application, rather than the
bounty-based development that is currently going on. I think that
this is something that should be considered, because infrastructure
and design-type development isn’t something that is really developed
in a for-bounty system. I don’t know that this will be a huge issue,
but there are some things like thread safety that are not sexy enough
to easily get funding for.
The developers expressed some frustration that there isn’t enough
user to user support sometimes. It was brought up that the MapServer
website is stale in many instances and the only active or live parts
of the website are the wiki (which is chaotic by definition) and
the links to the email archives. Steve expressed that he would like to
see the website put into some sort of a CMS so that the users can keep
it up rather than filtering through one group or one person like it
currently is. It was also suggested that the website be put into CVS,
but in my opinion that is a bad idea.
Cartoline drawing was discussed. Evidently, MapServer now has support
for drawing lines as polygons, which makes for prettier output and
in some cases draws faster.
Conference Closing Session
The conference closing session was a very lively discussion.
ESRI was discussed a quite a bit, and it was pointed out that
it gives the community a target to shot at/for. The development
models of course are very different, with ESRI using the monolithic,
one solution for everything model, and the open source developers using
a bunch of small, functional pieces that do what they do well and
then connected together. Time will tell which model wins out, but
I think many developers might start flocking to the unix-like model.
There was much “preaching to the converted” in the final plenary, but
the final conference wrap-up was a good discussion. Community was
the word, not things like open source, or specific software products.
The conference really gave the community a chance to become aware of
itself, who they were, and what they were doing. Not only will this
give the group momentum, I think that many new cool things will come
out of ideas discussed and mulled about while people were here.
On the bus ride back to the hotel, people were talking, but I really
couldn’t respond any more. My brain was full. It was a very intensive
conference with a lot of personal interaction. Presentations and
workshops were more of a formality so that we could call it a conference, as
most of the discussion was informal. All in all, it was exhilarating, exhausting,
and energizing all at the same time…