[Gvsig_english] QUESTION gvSIG 1.9 (BN 1253) -- Future of gvSIG and Sextante

[Benjamin Ducke]

----- "José Antonio Canalejo Alonso" <jacanalejo at yahoo.es> wrote:

Hi Jose,

> Hello Ben,
> there are a lot of people working on gvSIG Project and trying to make
> it sustainable for the future. That's not easy but they make it
> possible.

Yes, I understand. I am one of them. I have dedicated a lot of time
to gvSIG because I am convinced that it is a great project (and has
some equally great developers and users, btw.) and I believe that it is the 
first time an open source GIS is getting close to breaking the ESRI monopoly.

That's why I feel it is important to talk about anything that may be
going wrong!

> Your sentence is not true: "we have an official version for use at CIT
> and branches for use by the rest of the world" . The official version
> of gvSIG is for use all over the world.

My expression was probably a bit drastic. What I meant to say was:
A lot of users are expecting gvSIG to run on Java 1.6, to include
SEXANTE, to run on Win7 and Mac OS X. When these demands are not
being met, even though it is technically possible to do so, users
start wondering "why?". If the answer to that question is: "Because
of some internal consideration at CIT", then that is likely to frustrate
people outside CIT. I think we can see this start happening now and
it is not a good thing...

Also, the way gvSIG is being developed very much to fit CIT workflows
increases the risk that users with very different data and workflows
will get into trouble. An example of this happened to us at OA 
(problems with the raster engine and affinely transformed rasters) and
was the reason why we had to fork off the code for gvSIG OADE 2010.

> How do you want to make gvSIG OADE sustainable for the future us an
> open source project in the true spirit of it?
> 

I have worked in other open source projects before this one and
had a chance to study some of the dynamics involved, so let me
share some of my experience with you.