GRASS Incubation Progress

Document Purpose

The mentor will use this to inform the Incubation Committee of the project status and it will be the initial indication that a project is reaching graduation.

Basics

Has the project been approved for incubation by the OSGeo board?

Yes, and GRASS-PSC formed

Has an Incubation Mentor been assigned to the project?

Norman Vine and Arnulf Christl are assigned mentors.

Infrastructure Transition

Note, for each of the following it isn't necessary to move to foundation infrastructure, but if you aren't a reason should be provided.

Has the projectname.osgeo.org domain been populated with the projects web presence?

http://grass.osgeo.org http://www.osgeo.org/grass has been populated.

Is the OSGeo bug tracker being used for the project?

Currently the existing bug tracker is used. A migration may be possible in future.

Is the OSGeo mailing list manager being used for the project?

The announce list will be used, the other mailing lists will remain under http://grass.itc.it to maintain the long archives of emails (starting 1991).

Is the OSGeo SVN or CVS system being used for the project?

Currently the existing CVS is used. A migration may be possible in future.

Are binary and source downloads available from the OSGeo download area?

Yes. http://download.osgeo.org/grass/

Community Functioning

Is there a functioning user support mechanisms (ie. mailing list)?

Existing user support mechanisms are numerous mailing lists, IRC and Wiki. Companies are available for commercial support. There are also several national user groups. There is also a GRASS user map(server). The GRASS newsletter is currently adopted by OSGeo with the working title OSgeo Jounal.

Are source and binary downloads for the package available?

Yes. GRASS is a multi-platform GIS, all major operating systems are supported - see download page

Has a Project Steering Committee been formed, and given control of the project?

Yes. GRASS-PSC was formed in 12/2006

Does the Project Steering Committee have documentation on project procedures for PSC decisions, contributor guidelines, etc.

Yes. See RFC1: Project Steering Committee Guidelines

See also RFC2: Legal aspects of code contributions

How many active developers are there? Are they from multiple organizations?

Currently 38 (worldwide) developers have CVS write access. In 2006, around 16 developers of this group where active. FBK-irst (formerly ITC-irst) Trento, Italy is supporting the project since 2001, many universities, companies and individuals are contributing. For details, see the grass-commit mailing list archives. More than 10000 CVS commits have been done since 1st January 2000 (opening of CVS). See also CVS statistics which is part of the new GRASS Quality Assessment System and Ohloh statistics and CIA.

Foundation Membership

Have project documents been updated to reflect membership in the foundation, and the relationship of the project to the foundation?

Yes, see also Newsletter.

Has an effort been made to brand the project web site with OSGeo foundation web styling and branding marks?

Yes. The OSGeo logo is on the front page and search turns up 707 references to "OSGeo".

Code Copyright Review

Has a Code Provenance Review document been prepared for the project?

Yes, current status 97% see also GRASS Provenance Review.

Have issues raised in the provenance review been adequately addressed?

Yes.

Mentor Notes

Putting together notes for a documentatoin of the vetting process.

• Example of header addition: http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass-commit/2007-April/028266.html
• more of them here: http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass-commit.mbox/grass-commit.mbox

What has been done in past years (a lot more than most FOSSGIS projects that I know!)

• 1999 http://www.nabble.com/-GRASS5--Re%3A-license-issues-tf3092945.html#a8586443
• 2000 http://www.nabble.com/-GRASS5--Digging-for-license-problems-tf3092306.html#a8585800
• 2003 http://www.nabble.com/-GRASS5--Licensing-problem-tf3092995.html#a8586612

How is vetting done

• In a first step al main.c have been checked for the appearnace of the GNU GPL copyright text in sevral versions (the wording is not always identical but this was an easy way to select the recongnizable ones)
• The sulting list of main.c were checked manually.
  • If the provided information was not sufficient it was added.
  • As all source code is documented via CMS way back into last century most informaiton was there and had only be to retrieved and added as a aomment to the header
  • Most issues with code or content were resolved immediately (see CVS logs in the past months, watch out for copyright in the comments).
• Developers have been made aware of Code_Provenance_Review#FAQ.
• Whenever anybody touched any code in the past months the existence and correctness of license and author information was checked and then added, extende or cleaned up.
• The PSC chair and mentors have searched the code base for missing information on a random basis and found quite a few additional places that needed attention. The chai explained some ways of how certain issues were addressed:
  • Example of Public Domain ./grass6/visualization/xganim/
  • Exampe of "numerical recipies in C" removal http://www.nabble.com/NR-licence-issue-and-replacement-of-G_ludcmp%28%29-tf3682152.html

Open Issues

please resolve these or add to the list if you find anything

== Other Areas of Interest

• New sample dataset at http://mpa.itc.it/grasstutor/grasslocations/nc_spm_05_contents.html

Thinking about what license text to add here. This is probably out of the immediate scope of incubation.