OSGeo Community Projects

Purpose

OSGeo Labs is a place to list Open Source Geospatial Software that hasn't reached Incubation status. OSGeo Labs aims to:

• Help projects progress to OSGeo Incubation.
• Advertise projects and find like minded developers.
• Merge with similar projects. A project has a greater chance of reaching Incubation when integrated with similar projects.

This is the right place to start submitting your project so other OSGeo members can review them and send you feedback.

Criteria

Projects should only list themselves in OSGeo Labs if they follow the OSGeo Incubation principles.

1. The code is under an OSI approved license (data & doc projects need to specify their choice for a type of license).
2. The project is willing to keep code clear of encumbrances
3. The project is "geospatial", or directly supports geospatial applications.
4. The project hopes to become a graduated OSGeo project, or have reasons why incubation is not appropriate.

Becoming a Labs Project

Becoming an OSGeo Labs should be easy and encouraged to all project that respond to criterias above. All project that use the OSGeo infrastructure or that wants to assign their copyright to OSGeo should add themselves below.

Pending Incubation

Projects which have self assessed themselves ready for incubation and waiting for a mentor: List from OSGeo trac

• MapWindow - The MapWindow project was started in 1998 and became open source in January, 2005. It includes an ActiveX component (similar to ESRI's now discontinued MapObjects tool) an extensible desktop application, and a set of .NET libraries (MapWindow 6) which are intended to be an alternative to ESRI's ArcObjects. The MapWindow team has been a supporter of OSGeo since its inception, with workshops and exhibits at all-but-one FOSS4g conferences and participation on various OSGeo committees and efforts. We just held our first formal project conference in April 2010 at which the team agreed to apply for incubation status with OSGeo. The application is forth-coming.

Stable Projects

• GeoWebCache
• pgRouting

Young or Experimental Projects

• GeoExt
• GeoFunctions Geo Functions sourceforge page
• Geoinformatica OSGeo trac site
• OpenGeocoder
• OpenRouter
• Grids
• OSGeo Graphics
• thinkGeo, a Semantic GIS toolkit

Responsibilities

OSGeo Labs aims to have minimal red tape to reduce overhead.

Project Champion

The Project Champion is responsible for:

1. Strongly recommended: Read Karl Fogel's book on Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
2. Ensure the project complies with OSGeo principles by addressing the #Criteria above.
3. Create a home page for the project. The OSGeo wiki is recommended for this page. A page should answer the OSGeo #Criteria.
4. List the project under the appropriate heading on this page.
5. Announce and discuss the project on the OSGeo Discuss email list.
6. Move the project toward incubation.

Incubation Committee

The OSGeo Incubation Committee is responsible for:

1. Investigate, then possibly remove a project from OSGeo Labs if it doesn't follow OSGeo Labs #Criteria.
2. Periodically (at least annually), review projects in OSGeo labs and remove projects which have "died" or don't follow OSGeo Labs #Criteria.

Helpful Resource

1. Get your project a mailing-list and a bug tracker
   1. SourceForge provides code repository, mailing list and bug tracker services. (contact Landon Blake to get help on SourceForge service)
2. Approach the Spotlights editors about doing a spotlight interview about your project.

Assigning Copyright to OSGeo

Many graduated OSGeo projects choose to assign their copyright to OSGeo. A young project can assign its copyright to OSGeo by:

• TBD: As of 15 April 2009, the process for assigning copyright has not been resolved, it is being discussed on the OSGeo discuss email list. It may involve the following:
  • Asking the incubation committee and doing it
  • Having a graduated OSGeo project mentor yours

Using OSGeo infrastructure

It's possible to use OSGeo infrastructure to host your project or to have a trac and subversion server. You can get help if your project respond to criterias above and ask the right person for it.

Disclosure

OSGeo or any of its affiliates do not take responsibility or endorse any of the software listed here. OSGeo doesn't guarantee the integrity of the code or any other aspect of the above softwares.

References

• FreeGIS list