Time to Register for the February 2012 OSGeo Code Sprint

The 2012 OSGeo Code Sprint is approaching fast: February 5-9, 2012 at IslandWood (near Seattle). I will be there to work on MapServer and am already looking forward to spending some quality time there with other OSGeo developers and contributors.

Please don't wait and register now! Space is limited, and early registrations also help with the planning of the event. You will have a unique chance to work with others on your OSGeo projects and to interact with key developers from other projects. All in the woods on a small island in the Puget Sound.

If you've been to one of the previous editions in Toronto (2009), New-York (2010) and/or Montreal (2011) then you already know how productive those meetings are, if not then I invite you to read my summary of the 2011 Montreal Code Sprint.

For more information or to register please visit the wiki page, or email our host, Michael Gerlek, directly at mpg@flaxen.com.

I signed up already. Have you?

Obligations related to open source software licenses

A question that I hear often is whether open source software can be used in a proprietary (closed source) application. The answer is "it depends": it depends on the license of the open source components that you use and how the components are being used in your application.

This question came up again today on the gdal-dev discussion list, and Even Rouault posted an answer that summarizes very well the obligations related to the most common licenses in our field: GPL, LGPL, BSD and MIT/X11.

I reproduce Even's answer here for reference as a starting point for next time someone asks:

... here's my understanding of the obligations of the licences. Take it with a
grain of salt : "I'm not a lawyer".

* If your application links to a GPL library, the whole application, including
your own code, is bound by the GPL. You must include the appropriate copyright
notice for the library and provide the user access to the source code of the GPL
library (including the modifications you may have done) and to the code of your
application too under the terms of the GPL.

* If your application links to a LGPL library, you must include the appropriate
copyright notice for the library and provide the user access to the source code
of the LGPL library (including the modifications you may have done in it). Your
application itself may be released under the terms you like.

* If your application links to a BSD library, well, that's depend of the BSD
licence. There are 2-clause, 3-clause and 4-clause variants of the BSD
licence... If it includes the following clause "Redistributions in binary form
must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution", well just comply with it. Otherwise, if you don't distribute
any source code (and you don't have to), you have nothing to do. In any case,
the licence only covers the library code, not your application.

* The MIT licence is a bit similar, except that, the general understanding is
that it places no obligations if you distribute the library as a binary object.
But I've always found that the term "the Software" in the licence isn't very
explicit if it only covers only the source code or binaries generated from it.
So it might be nice to include the copyright notice somewhere if you distribute
it as a binary. If you distribute it as source code, it's clear that you must
include the copyright notice.

News from the Montreal OSGeo Code Sprint

This week, Montreal was the host of OSGeo's 2011 Code Sprint where 29 OSGeo project developers and contributors from North America and Europe spent four intensive days working and meeting face to face for the advancement of their respective projects.

This year's sprint included teams working on the following projects: MapServer, GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, libLAS, ZOO Project, TinyOWS and GeoPrisma. In addition to the actual coding and project meetings, those sprints provide a unique way to build and maintain synergies between the projects and their developers.

On the MapServer front, the focus was on the 6.0 release. MapServer 6.0.0-beta2 should be released later this afternoon with the outcome of the sprint work.

Ruby bindings for MapServer and GDAL were brought back into maintenance, and some enhancements were made to the Oracle (OCI) driver in OGR.

The LibLAS group has been planning and setting up the bases of the new libPC (PC for Point Cloud), which will provide a generic interface to point cloud data formats. Think of libPC as the GDAL of point clouds.

The PostGIS team moved closer to the PostGIS 2.0 release with core changes to indexes, better support for raster map algebra, and several tickets closed on shp2pgsql.

The ZOO Project team worked on a new WPS service for athmospheric dispersion to simulate the dispersion of the cloud that spreads from the Japanese nuclear power plants. The team also made some good progress (testing and docs) towards the upcoming ZOO 1.2 release.

A MapServer mapfile parser has been added to TinyOWS to directly read the layer configuration information from a MapServer mapfile. This addition will significantly facilitate the use of TinyOWS as a WFS-T to complement MapServer. 

The GeoPrisma team got together to add support for two new service types (OGC WFS and WPS), as well as fixes to the print widget and some general security issues. They also started to build demos integrating the latest version of most projects present at the sprint including: MapServer, TinyOWS (with mapfile support), GeoPrisma, Zoo-Project and WKTRaster. Stay tuned to see this demo in action (link not available yet).

And of course there was the social side of the program, with a hockey night on Thursday, and hours of talk and lots of new ideas exchanged informally during the social events each night. 

Part of the group also went for a hike to the top of Mont-Royal to enjoy the view from the top of Montreal Island:

Once again, thank you to our sponsors and to our host for making this event possible, and to all the participants who made this a success.

Finally, there are already talks about the 2012 Code Sprint which is likely going to take place in Seattle (see here).

P.S. More pictures from the sprint are available on flickr.

ESRI publishes its position on open source software

(Version française)

I just found out that ESRI has published an official position on open source software on its website at http://esri.com/opensource that sounds quite encouraging. (Thanks to Chaipat Nengcomma's blog post that I could not read but that hinted me to this.)

There is also an interesting podcast where Victoria Kouyoumjian (ESRI IT strategy architect) "discusses ESRI’s position on open source and the importance of open source software in GIS application development" (quoting their own summary).

We already knew that ESRI had been using GDAL for some time, had integrated support for PostGIS in SDE more recently and even sponsored FOSS4G 2007, but to find an official statement of their position is definitely encouraging. I even dare to dream of collaboration between ESRI people and other OSGeo projects in the not too distant future (gotta be optimistic).

I know (for having been through this myself a few years ago) that ESRI has not always had only good words for people who made the choice of open source software for their projects in the past. Let's hope this position is sincere and will propagate across the whole organisation, and that things will really change and lead to a spirit of real collaboration, for the benefit of all the neo-geographers who want the best of both worlds.

Position officielle d'ESRI sur les produits Open Source

(English version)

Je viens de découvrir sur le site Web d'ESRI à http://esri.com/opensource une position officielle au sujet des produits open source qui est plutôt encourageante. (Merci au blogue de Chaipat Nengcomma que je n'ai pas pu lire mais qui m'a mis la puce à l'oreille.)

Il y aussi un podcast intéressant où Victoria Kouyoumjian (ESRI IT strategy architect) "discute la position d'ESRI sur l'open source et l'importance du logiciel open source dans le développement d'applications géomatiques" (traduction de leur propre résumé).

On savait déjà dans le milieu qu'ESRI utilisait GDAL dans ses produits depuis un certain temps, avait intégré le support pour PostGIS dans SDE plus récemment et a même commandité le FOSS4G 2007, mais de voir une publication officielle de cette position est définitivement encourageant. J'ose même rêver d'une collaboration réelle entre les gens d'ESRI et d'autres projets OSGeo dans l'avenir (il faut bien être optimiste).

Je sais (pour l'avoir vécu moi-même il y a quelques années) qu'ESRI n'a pas toujours eu que de bons mots pour les produits open source et ceux qui en font le choix pour leurs projets. Espérons donc que cette prise de position est sincère et va se propager dans toute l'organisation, et que les choses vont vraiment changer et mener à un esprit de collaboration réel, pour le bénéfice de tous les néo-géomaticiens qui veulent le meilleur des deux mondes.

NYC Code Sprint Update #1

As the great reporter that he is, Paul wrote up great summaries of Day 0 and Day 1 of the New York Code Sprint.

In addition to the MapServer 6.0 release plan discussions (brainstorming) that he already mentioned, I have been involved in several discussions here and there about MapServer and GDAL/OGR.

One of the main coding tasks for me yesterday was the extraction of the OGRSpatialReference code from GDAL/OGR into a standalone libOSR package that currently sits in a sandbox in GDAL's SVN repository. This libOSR package will be useful to libLAS, PostGIS, and other packages that need SRS conversion utilities but don't want to carry a complete copy of the GDAL library.

On the menu for me today: some experiments to support on-the-fly conversion of XML mapfiles to text mapfiles inside MapServer using the XSLT, and then possibly start looking into SVG symbol support.

OSGeo Code Sprint 2010 in New York

(Version Française)

OSGeo's New York Code Sprint 2010 is approaching fast. Planned by Paul Ramsey, the event will take place from February 20th to 23rd in OpenGeo's offices. Twenty developers will be getting together for four days to work on their favorite projects, including (but not limited to) MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR, libLAS and OpenLayers.

I'll be there with Alan Boudreault for Mapgears and we plan to work on MapServer. See the wiki for an overview of what each project team is planning to achieve. If time permits, I may also post some updates live from the event through this blog.

Those who cannot make it to New York City are invited to join the event on IRC channel #tosprint (on irc.freenode.net). Cheers to Anton Patrushev and Daniel Kastl (pgRouting), as well as Jeff McKenna (MapServer, MS4W), who plan to join the group via IRC directly from Japan.

Finally, thanks to the sponsors who make this event possible:

• LizardTech
• Coordinate Solutions
• qPublic.net
• Farallon Geographics
• Avencia
• OpenGeo

Code Sprint OSGeo 2010 à New York

(English Version)

Le Code Sprint OSGeo 2010 de New York arrive à grands pas. Organisé par Paul Ramsey, l'événement aura lieu du 20 au 23 février aux bureaux d'OpenGeo et regroupera pendant quatre jours une vingtaine de développeurs en provenance (entre autres) des projets MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR, libLAS et OpenLayers.

Pour ma part, j'y serai avec Alan Boudreault, et nous prévoyons travailler sur MapServer. Un aperçu de ce que les différentes équipes de travail visent à accomplir est disponible dans le wiki. Si le temps le permet, je vais tenter de poster des compte-rendus via mon blog.

En plus des participants sur place, ceux qui ne peuvent se déplacer sont invités à se joindre à l'événement via le canal IRC #tosprint (sur irc.freenode.net). Salutations particulières à Anton Patrushev et Daniel Kastl (pgRouting), ainsi que Jeff McKenna (MapServer, MS4W), qui prévoient se joindre au groupe via IRC à partir du Japon.

Finalement, un petit clin d'oeil aux commanditaires qui rendent cet événement possible:

• LizardTech
• Coordinate Solutions
• qPublic.net
• Farallon Geographics
• Avencia
• OpenGeo