Hobu, Inc.

Sean posted some wishes he has for the foundation discussions in 2006. It is unfortunate that the re-engauging of the foundation discussions have been happening over the holiday season, so the opportunity for many folks to participate at this point isn’t there. But when people come back, the discussions will probably continue in full force.

Re Sean’s wishes:

1. My head is pulled out. I made a point in my last post about the foundation that it was cooperative vs antagonistic competition. They will compete regardless.
2. I agree that the name churn needs to be stopped. Multiple polls that look to tease things apart to see if there is wiggle room demonstrate that there isn’t any.
3. Financial disclosure. Financial contacts or potential financial contacts between members of the Open Letter should be disclosed in my opinion. Other than being offered an airplane ticket and a hotel room by Autodesk to the bootstrapping meeting that hasn’t happened yet, I have no financial connections.
4. Software focus. Sean makes the point that maybe a foundation should worry about the commonalities between Tux and MapServer, ie GDAL, GD, PROJ.4, GEOS, etc. Maybe, but those software tools do not have large communities around them - they are more developer-oriented and they aren’t so end-user oriented. If the foundation were to be solely software- and development-focused, that might make a lot of sense. The proposals and sentiment for the MapServer foundation seem to be marketing, branding, and community oriented, however.

The MapServer Foundation

Here are some things that I think the MapServer foundation should concern itself with:

1. A common home for the software. This includes website, user documentation, download, and development support infrastructure (CVS, bugzilla, etc). This stuff is a sunk cost for whatever organization hosts them and the entire community benefits directly from it - the entire community should have an opportunity to step up and support it.
2. Either the foundation is developer oriented and attempts to provide legal shielding ala the Apache Foundation developers, or the foundation is marketing and branding oriented. Can a software foundation do both? Maybe, but what I need or want from a foundation as a developer is probably quite different than what someone who sells MapServer services probably needs.

The MapServer Project

Here are some things that I think the MapServer project needs to do to get its house in order:

1. A project steering committee, whether derived from parts of the MTSC with others being brought in, or completely separate entity that is elected needs to be created. As a member of the MTSC, I felt very uncomfortable representing anyone’s interests but my own. We were in non-technical territory, and the community never explicitly told me that I represented them. We need a decision-making body that can participate and represent MapServer in foundation bootstrapping.
2. The project needs to articulate what it needs from a software foundation. What will it take for UMN to see that putting the software (and copyright) in a software foundation is the best thing to do? What do we need? What do we want? What are the deal breakers?
3. By when? It isn’t fair to Autodesk for the MapServer project to flounder around. How do we make a decision to join and when does it need to be done? “Sometime in the future” is not an acceptable answer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 6:08 pm and is filed under MapServer, Open Source Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.