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Breakout Meeting Takaways

Breakout Meeting Takaways

Working Group Takeaways


Saturday, February 04, 2006

2:36 PM

 

  1. Governance



"Jody Garnett: "In Open Source we start from a position of trust"

  1. Membership

    1. Bootstrap membership with 25 people who showed up PLUS

    2. 20 more people (those would couldn't make it for time/money/quota) - accepted in two weeks

      1. Nominations are open: will be the mailing list consisting of the Chicago 25. Invite

    3. Make it clear that these aren't a substitution for a PMC

  2. Board

    1. Interim at first, 12 month window: 2/3 of current membership can remove board member after 60 mo. .grace period or when bylaws are set - whichever comes first.

    2. 5 people from here today (Arnulf, Frank, Gary, Chris, Markus)

    3. If > 5 volunteer, a vote will be taken

    4. 4 more to be added after the 20 members are added, to be taken from the 20

    5. Tasks

      1. Incubator model

      2. Define "real" board setup

        1. Elections, staggered, size?

      3. Define membership classes

        1. Individual, indiv + corporate?

      4. Bylaws, formal incorporation



 

  1. PSC (Project Steering Committee)

    1. <Get from flip chart>

    2. Project - need not be software

      1. Curriculum development

      2. Conferences

      3. Software

  2. Funding

    1. income, expenses

    2. OpEx estimates

      1. $5K HW

      2. $20K GA

      3. $50K Reserve (conferences, etc.)

      4. $150K - community management, site setup, $20K-$200K for ongoing community maintenance

    3. Income possibilities

      1. Priority of $$ => Projects

      2. Logo/Sponsor/PR

      3. Sponsors Round Table  at annual conference

        1. Annual Reports

        2. Road Maps



 

 

  1. Legal

    1. Concern is loss of control (over code and other works)

    2. Pick a subset of the 50 licenses

    3. Not assigning code copyright

    4. License Compatibility

      1. LGPL, MIT, Apache, etc.

      2. Can't solve w/o changing the licenses

      3. Legal basis for code sharing is "spirit of cooperation" (see ii)

    5. Diligence over the code provenance

    6. "Indemnification" for officers/members, etc.



Legal Breakout

 

Takeaways:

Big concern about loss of control. Two things. First, reminder of ability to fork. Second, developers retain rights in contributions. Thus, sole copyright assignment is disfavored. Prefer either an Apache approach (contributor license) or an openoffice approach (joint copyright). Main reasons for having foundation own joint copyright are enforceability and ease of relicensing.

 

This raised issue of relicensing. Should foundation have right to relicense? Or should contributors be able to put strings on contributions such as “can only license this under GPL or MIT”.

 

What should be the requirements for bringing code into foundation. Apache model is to require all committers to sign contributor agreements over patent and copyright. This could be an issue for foundation projects. How much risk does the foundation assume?

 

License compatibility. Main issue is using more restrictive code in less restrictive codebases. We’re never really going to solve this unless everyone uses the same license, which isn’t realistic. Going to need to rely on cooperation – ie., useful code can be “contributed” or cross licensed to multiple projects.

 

“Mandatory” vs. “Preferred” Licenses. OSI as least common denominator. Subset as preferred licenses.

 

Indemnification for officers and directors. D&O insurance.

 

 

 

  1. Community Management

    1. Project Consolidation

      1. Phase 1

        1. Develop a plan for transition to foundation site

        2. Common platform chosen

        3. Consolidation deferred until it makes sense for the projects

        4. Using CollabNet to bootstrap this

        5. Need to develop templates that make it look like Howard's site

        6. Agree on common platform

        7. Agree on common templates/styles

 

  1. Phase II

    1. Consolidated Site

  2. Developer Tools

    1. Develop Guidelines/best OSS practices to work toward

      1. e.g. init tests

      2. Release strategies

      3. Co-release dependencies

      4. Localization/countrification

    2. CVS/SVN to be considered

    3. CIA tracking for commits -> IRC

    4. User interaction for xlating documentation

    5. International Portals & Code/apps

  3. Conferences

    1. Floating geographic location

 

  1. Chris to look into Java Community people

    1. Geotools - will know by 2 weeks from now

    2. GeoServer

    3. GeoNetworks

 

  1. MapServer TSC Meeting by 2 weeks from now

 

  1. Projects

    1. OGR/GDAL

    2. GRASS

    3. MapBender

    4. MapGuide

    5. Open Source GIS Data - Allan Doyle to head up

    6. OSSIMi

    7. MapBuilder



 

 

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