[Gvsig_english] Why gvSIG CE came about & CLA

[Francisco José Peñarrubia]

Hi Wolfgang.

We have a serious problem if here in this list there are people who 
doesn't know the purpose of the Association....

The main goal of the Association is to maintain alive gvSIG!!!. And how? 
Well, there is a lot of volunteer work, but also money is needed to 
maintain gvSIG and keep it growing.
So, the companies inside the Association (not hte honour members) are 
putting money for gvSIG!!. We pay a percentage of our projects to 
maintain gvSIG.
I think is a bit dissapointing to me (as part of the Association) if 
this is not well understood.

Several days ago I was thinking we should explain better the model to 
other people AND projects. Because many of them asked how is it possible 
having gvSIG like we have (growing), but other projects have many problems.
My proposal was to write a post in gvSIG's blog, but also, explain the 
model well in other forums (economical forums or others). People from 
Grass, or from 52 North, or from INSPIRE asked us how all of this is 
possible.
And it took time to explain well, but they got surprised about it.

I think is a very naive approach to think about SL as something operated 
as (only) volunteers. There many many aspects to push if we want to 
reach success, at least in my opinion.

There are some projects that uses other models (University for GRASS, or 
QGis, or Geoserver pushed by a company, or Linux, or Apache Foundation, 
or Eclipse Foundation....) Each project has its own particularities, and 
it depends a lot of having a very powerful community behind, or people 
in universities, etc). For us, we think the model chosen is the reason 
gvSIG may survive.

And this is only about the economical model. We can talk a lot about the 
organizational model, and I agree there are many aspects that we should 
do better, especially about contributions (from inside and from 
"outside" (I don't like this classification, forgive me)). But I know 
there are many people trying to change this bad (old) behaviour, and we 
should give them an opportunity. I believe we need rules (think about 
Linux and Linuz Torvalds rules.... he is a very heavy filter....) but I 
agree, the rules should be adapted, and that's other people are doing 
right now.

Been optimistic, I don't want to have a fork... but at least, the fork 
will help to clarify many things arround the project, and will make us 
better.

So, remember: we need to explain the Association better. Is not 
something bad, is good for all (in my opinion).

Best regards.

Fran.

El 01/07/2011 14:11, Wolfgang Qual escribió:
> Dear Jorge, dear all,
>
> I did not care that much about the Association, but I have to say that I
> never fully understood, why it's there. I know that several companies and
> institutions are part of it, but that's all. We as an organisation were
> invited to become an honour member, but it was not really clear why we
> should join the association.
> Would it give us a "louder voice" when talking about the future development
> of gvSIG? I think/hope that working for the project is possible under
> gvsig.org (this list, documentation etc). The association's gvsig.*com* is a
> bit confusing for me (as "com" stands for commercial). It could well be that
> I missed something.
>
> Best,
> Wolfgang
>
> --
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-- 
Fran Peñarrubia
Scolab
www.scolab.es

Asociación gvSIG
www.gvsig.com