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, GRASS is a board approved "founding project"; the GRASS-PSC was 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 is a copy of the main site; http://www.osgeo.org/grass has been populated with content.

Is the OSGeo bug tracker being used for the project?: Yes.

Is the OSGeo mailing list manager being used for the project?: All mailing lists are now running at http://lists.osgeo.org.

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

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 has been adopted by OSGeo as OSgeo Journal.

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 9/2006

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 42 (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 - now code in SVN). See also SVN 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. http://grass.osgeo.org/ has been populated.

Code Copyright Review

Has a Code Provenance Review document been prepared for the project?: Yes, see also GRASS Provenance Review. We consider this long-term open source project (1982-today) as a large body of prior art which might be interesting in potential OSGeo patent issues.

Have issues raised in the provenance review been adequately addressed?: Yes.

Mentor Notes

Putting together notes for a documentation of the vetting process.

Example of header addition: http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass-commit/2007-April/028266.html (Note: archive unavailable online since migration was not accepted by OSGeo-SAC :-( )
more of them here: http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass-commit.mbox/grass-commit.mbox

What has been done in past years:

1999: GPL 2 and later addition in the headers
2000: identification of license incompatible code
- https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2000-September/012134.html etc
- https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2000-December/011086.html etc
2003: identification of license incompatible code

How is vetting done

In a first step all main.c have been checked for the appearance of the GNU GPL copyright text in several versions (the wording is not always identical but this was an easy way to select the recognizable ones)
The resulting 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 information was there and had only be to retrieved and added as a a comment 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, extended or cleaned up.
The PSC chair and mentors started to search the code base for missing information on a random basis and found quite a few additional places that needed attention. The chair explained some ways of how certain issues were addressed:
- Example of Public Domain ./grass6/visualization/xganim/
- Example of "numerical recipies in C" removal http://www.nabble.com/NR-licence-issue-and-replacement-of-G_ludcmp%28%29-tf3682152.html
- As a result from the preliminary searches the mentors have started to check all modules. A painfully large pile that is.
- All issues have been resolved --Seven 15:13, 23 January 2008 (EST)

Other Areas of Interest

New sample dataset at http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php - published with CC-BY-SA license.