MapProxy Incubation Application

= MapProxy Incubation Application =

Mailing list discussion: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/2012-January/001747.html

Ticket: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/851

Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.
Oliver Tonnhofer, olt<ät>omniscale.de, Omniscale GmbH & Co. KG

Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers

 * Oliver Tonnhofer, olt<ät>omniscale.de, Omniscale GmbH & Co. KG
 * Dominik Helle, helle<ät>omniscale.de, Omniscale GmbH & Co. KG
 * Marcel Radischat, radischadt<ät>omniscale.de, Omniscale GmbH & Co. KG

Please describe your Project.
MapProxy is an open source proxy for geospatial data. It caches, accelerates and transforms data from existing map services and serves any desktop or web GIS client.

MapProxy is a tile cache solution, but also offers many new and innovative features like full support for WMS clients and a powerful authorization API.

Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?
We believe that OSGeo is a powerful brand in the geo-spatial software world and that the MapProxy project would benefit from this brand. We hope that this will convince even more people that MapProxy is an open and sustainable project.

On the other hand, MapProxy fits in well in the OSGeo software stack. It can be used in combination with other software like MapServer, GeoServer, OpenLayers, QGIS, etc and this has been demonstrated on the last OSGeo LiveDVD.

Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):
Server/proxy application.

Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.
MapProxy is written in Python and uses multiple open source libraries, from Python Image Library to GDAL, Proj4 and GEOS.

Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.
Development was started by Omniscale and most development is still done by Omniscale today. There are no commercial versions of MapProxy available (no dual-licensing, etc.).

Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?
The source code is already released under the Apache License 2.0.

Is there already a beta or official release?
The first official release was made in March 2010 and there were 18 official releases in the last 20 month. Six of them were releases with new (major) features. We offer backwards compatibility between releases since the release of version 1.0.0.

What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?
The project started as a commercial product by Omniscale and was open sourced in March 2010.

=== Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point? ===

It implements various open standards like WMS, WMTS, KML, and TMS.

Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?
The code does not contain anything where we have patents on and we are not aware of any other existing patents. The Apache License also contains a patent clause.

MapProxy is not a registered trademark.

All rights are held by Omniscale, with the exception of a few modules that are included in MapProxy. These modules are under a BSD-ish licenses, included in separate files. Copyright is documented in COPYING.txt, see https://bitbucket.org/olt/mapproxy/raw/default/COPYING.txt

How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?
Most code is contributed by Omniscale, with only a few smaller patches from other people. We received monetary contributions from various companies in the last two years to implement new features for MapProxy. A few of these companies are also active contributors in other OSGeo projects.

But the codebase of MapProxy is also not very large, with only 11k lines of code (23k in total with 10k lines of tests and 2k for external modules distributed with MapProxy).

How many people have commit access to the source code repository?
We use a distributed version control system, so anybody can fork the project and provide code.

Approximately how many users are currently using this project?
We have an active mailing list with 140 subscribers (as of January 2012) and the past releases where downloaded nearly 10000 times.

We know from conferences, mailing lists and business contacts, that MapProxy is used by a lot of open source GIS companies. Especially in Germany, were we are active in the local chapter (FOSSGIS e.V.).

What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?
Mostly government, but also commercial and academic users.

If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?
Our mailing list is already hosted by OSGeo as a OSGeo Lab project. We do not use SVN and we do not intend to switch to it. We are using Mercurial for our source code repositories and we might switch to Git in the future.

Does the project include an automated build and test?
We have an extensive test suite with over 1000 unit and system tests. We have a continuous integration server that runs all these tests automatically with different Python versions. (http://ci.mapproxy.org/)

Documentation is build nightly and there are packages with the latest source code available.

What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)
Python and it makes use of libraries written in C (Proj4, GDAL, ...)

What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?
All source code, comments and documentation is written in English.

What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project?
Should fit on a floppy.