[Gvsig_english] gvSIG CE (Community Edition)

[José Antonio Canalejo Alonso]

Dear all,
As most of you will be aware, we have been preparing a  fork of the gvSIG 
sources under a new, more agile and open project  umbrella for
some time.
As of today, we would like to announce the  inception of gvSIG CE (Community 
Edition), and invite you to  participate in maintaining and
developing it. This is an early announcement, to be followed soon by a message 
to a broader audience.
For  those of you who have not been following the behind-the-scenes  discussion, 
here is a summary of the motivations behind this move:
*  Language: At this point, gvSIG is well known in Spain and Latin America  but 
less so in non-Spanish speaking countries. The gvSIG team
has  made a commendable effort to produce English documentation, but that is  
not enough, as much of the critical communication is still
handled in Spanish.
By contrast, gvSIG CE will be an English-speaking project for a more 
international community.
*  Openness: Open source projects grow through collaboration between  project 
teams. In the case of gvSIG, this concerns projects such as
NavTable,  SEXTANTE, GRASS GIS and the GDAL/OGR driver libraries. For this  
collaboration to work well, it is crucial to have a non-hierarchical,  
transparent and open development and decision making process, where all  
interested parties are equally informed and involved.
* Agility:  While all of us value stable and well-documented software, most of 
us  value working and available software even more. We believe
the best  strategy is to get code released and have it tested and patched using 
a  simple, agile process that does not waste coders' time.
We wish to make developing for gvSIG CE an enjoyable and barrier-free 
experience.
* This project is not intended to compete with or replace the original gvSIG 
(http://www.gvsig.org).  We simply wish to create a new platform for all those 
who can identify  with the motivations listed above. It is our hope that both 
projects  will benefit from a lively exchange of ideas and code
CSGIS,  OA Digital, the German Archaeological Institute, the SEXTANTE project  
and Bern University, among others, already support the gvSIG CE  initiative, and 
believe it the right decision to make gvSIG more  international and attract new 
contributions and sources of funding. We
hope that we will have your support, as well.
 We  plan to base the first release of gvSIG CE on the code base of gvSIG  OADE, 
plus the patches and improvements in the CIT SVN for gvSIG 1.11  (and perhaps 
1.12), plus any other contributed patches and new features.
Another focus for immediate work will lie on updating the SEXTANTE and GRASS 
interfaces.
The source code for gvSIG OADE can now be found on our new Sourceforge project 
site: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gvsigce. A preliminary
wiki can be found here: http://gvsigce.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Much  work lies ahead of us now, which is why we are writing to you at  this  
time, before the official announcement for gvSIG CE, which we plan
to send to a wider group of people as soon as we have the basic infrastructure 
in place.
We  are looking for people to help us design and administer the web pages,  
improve documentation and web content, provide testing and
feedback  of the software, contribute ideas and funding -- and of course produce  
great code! If you are interested in collaborating on one of
these or any other aspects, please sign up to our community mailing list at 
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gvsigce-community
to  get in touch with us. If you are willing to work on any part of gvSIG  CE, 
you will need a (free) Sourceforge account. If you don't have one  yet, sign up 
here: https://sourceforge.net/user/registration.  Then let us know your 
Sourceforge Username, tell us a little about  yourself and how you would like to 
contribute -- and become part of the  project team!
 For the gvSIG CE project:
 Benjamin Ducke (http://oadigital.net, http://www.dainst.de)
 Jose Canalejo & Ruth Schönbuchner (http://csgis.de)
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