OTB Project Incubation Status

General
Yes. Announcement was made publicly on December 17, 2013. Yes. Landon Blake.
 * 1) Has the project been approved for incubation by the OSGeo board?
 * 1) Has an Incubation Mentor been assigned to the project?

Infrastructure Transition
No. An existing web page exists: http://orfeo-toolbox.org/otb/ No. An existing bug tracker is being used by the project: http://bugs.orfeo-toolbox.org No. An existing version control system is being used for the project: http://hg.orfeo-toolbox.org/OTB No. Downloads are available from the existing web site: http://orfeo-toolbox.org/otb/download.html
 * 1) Has the projectname.osgeo.org domain been populated with the projects web presence? If not why, and has the project page got a prominent link to the real home?
 * 1) Is the OSGeo bug tracker being used for the project? If not, why? Is the OSGeo mailing list manager (http://lists.osgeo.org/) being used for the project? If not, why?
 * 1) Is the OSGeo SVN being used for the project? If not, why?
 * 1) Are binary and source downloads available from http://download.osgeo.org ? If not, why?

Community Functioning
The project currently provides support through a mailing list, managed using Google Groups (otb-users and otb-developers). Downloads are available from the existing web site: http://orfeo-toolbox.org/otb/download.html A Project Steering Committee has been formed and it is now used to make decisions for the software project. (See: http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Project_Steering_Committee and http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Summary_of_PSC_Decisions)
 * 1) Is there a functioning user support mechanisms (ie. mailing list)?
 * 1) Are source and binary downloads for the package available?
 * 1) Has a Project Steering Committee been formed, and given control of the project?

Update: (2015-07-24) A Project Steering Committee has been formed. Management decisions are now made in a standard way. Details on the Project Steering Committee can be found at http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Project_Steering_Committee.


 * 1) Does the Project Steering Committee have documentation on project procedures for PSC decisions, contributor guidelines?

In early 2015, OTB set up an official Project Steering committee (PSC) to provide high level guidance and coordination. It provides a central point of contact for the project and arbitrates disputes. It is also a stable base of institutional knowledge to the project and tries its best to involve more developers and guarantees that OTB remains open and company neutral. The OTB PSC was inspired by existing structure which exists in other geospatial software projects like GRASS GIS, GDAL or QGIS.

The documentation about how the governance works in general and hopw decisions are made is publicly available in the OTB PSC status page. All the decisions regarding OTB are also public and follow a procedure called RFC (Request for Changes) which is also describes in the OTB wiki.

A Request for Changes describes a change in Orfeo ToolBox code, API, infrastructure or processes in general that need to be submitted to the PSC vote. Those elements should be provided in an email to the public OTB developer list, with subject starting by "Request For Changes: ".

The list of all Request for Changes is maintained and publicly available on the OTB wiki.

The PSC status gives also information about contributor guidelines and also in particular how new commiters or PSC members can be added to the project. Like other decisions, it would be done with an RFC on the mailing list, a public discussion, a then a vote.

The OTB website gives also more information on how to contribute to the project.

OTB was created from its inception as a collaborative, community effort. As many open source projects there are number of ways to participate which do not all require programming capabilities: documentation, bug reports and feature requests are all very valuable.

The ohloh page of the Orfeo ToolBox provides a comprehensive view of contributors activity:
 * 1) How many active developers are there? Are they from multiple organizations? Indicate number and some organizations involved.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/otb/contributors?sort=latest_commit

There were around 15 committers over the last year.

The "Contributors" chapter of the Software Guide gives a complete listing of all contributors and their affiliations from the beginning of the project :

http://orfeo-toolbox.org/SoftwareGuide/SoftwareGuidech35.html#x64-52100035

Very active users and occasional contributors include:


 * Jordi Inglada from CESBIO/CNES is the creator of OTB and as such wrote a lot of OTB code in the past. He still actively uses and promotes it, with a lot of client codes, testing, bug reports, phd and intern works ...
 * Gregoire Mercier from Télécom Bretagne wrote the entire wavelet transform code as well as other codes, and currently has a phd working with OTB,
 * Angelos Tzotzos from National Technical University of Athens is actively packaging OTB for OpenSuse. He also contributed code for a pan-sharpening algorithm and integrated some OTB in the Gnorasi project,
 * Agustin Lobo, who I believe is with CSIC, is a very active user that benchmarked some of OTB functions and makes insightful comments on improving documentation for instance,
 * Julien Radoux (UCL) has contributed some algorithms by the past and is still very active on the users list,
 * Emmanuel Christophe, currently with Google, who wrote a great deal of OTB code by the past, under CNES and Crisp affiliations.

Foundation Membership
The project documentation has been modified to reflect membership in OSGeo.
 * 1) Have project documents been updated to reflect membership in the foundation, and the relationship of the project to the foundation? If not, indicate when this will occur.

The community page of otb include OSGeo and otb status regarding the incubation process. The event section promote also conference like FOSS4G and is regularly updated.
 * 1) Has an effort been made to brand the project web site with OSGeo foundation web styling and branding marks? If not, indicate what is planned.

Code Copyright Review
OTB Code Provenance Review
 * 1) Has a Code Provenance Review document been prepared for the project?
 * 1) Have issues raised in the provenance review been adequately addressed? Indicate outstanding issues.

A complete list of all copyrights is maintained in the OTB source tree and follows Apache foundation guidelines.

OTB is moreover integrated in Debian as an official package. OTB is also package for other distribution (fedora, opensuse, Arch...).


 * 1) Are Committer Responsibilities Guidelines covering legal issues in place?

Since migration to Apache v2 in 2017, contributors to the ORFEO ToolBox project need to complete, sign and email to cla@orfeo-toolbox.org an “Individual Contributor Licensing Agreement” (ICLA) form and  a “Corporate Contributor Licensing Agreement” (CCLA) form if you are contributing on behalf of your company or another entity which retains copyright for your contribution. CLA and ICLA were directly adapted by Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement provided by the Apache foundation.