General Principles of Incubation

Revision Notes

The official 1.0 version of this document, from July 2006 is at: http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/principles.html
This document is proposed to be retired, as its contents are mostly duplicated by other documents, or out of date.
Identifiers have been added to this wiki version, as well as references to equivalent words from other documents.

The purpose of the OSGeo incubation process is to ensure that projects that are officially part of OSGeo:

1. have a successfully operating open and collaborative development community. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#open.2
2. have clear IP oversight of the code base of the project. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Copyright_and_License
3. adopt the OSGeo principles and operating principles. Ref: #Operating_Principles
4. are mentored through the incubation process.

5. Projects should manage themselves, striving for consensus and encouraging participation from all contributors - from beginning users to advanced developers. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#open.2
6. Contributors are the scarce resource and successful projects court and encourage them. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#open.2
7. Projects are encouraged to adopt open standards and collaborate with other OSGeo projects. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Projects
8. Projects are responsible for reviewing and controlling their code bases to insure the integrity of the open source baselines. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Copyright_and_License

9. Projects should document how they manage themselves. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#processes.3
10. Projects should maintain developer and user documentation. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Documentation
11. Projects should maintain a source code management system. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#processes.1
12. Projects should maintain a discrepancy tracking system. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#processes.2
13. Projects should maintain project mailing lists. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#processes.2b
14. Projects should actively promote their participation in OSGeo. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Marketing
15. Projects are encouraged to adopt OSGeo look and feel, branding, logos on their project sites. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#Marketing
16. Projects are encouraged to participate in OSGeo standardization efforts to present a common interface for OSGeo visitors and members. Project_Graduation_Checklist#Marketing
17. Projects should have automated build and smoke test systems. Ref: Project_Graduation_Checklist#release.2