Re: Looking for someone who can answer questions wrt. Open Source and Standardization

[Martin Desruisseaux <ma...@geomatys.com>]

Hello Isabel

I put the Apache geospatial mailing list in copy because I believe this
community has lot of experience in interactions between Open Source
software and standardization. For example the Apache Spatial Information
System (SIS) project is a lot about implementing standards developed
jointly by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO). Apache SIS sits between the two
world; we contribute both to the development of some standards inside
OGC (in the limit of our capacity) and their implementation inside Apache.

One person that may be nice to get in touch is George Percivall. He is a
member of OGC staff (also a key person in organizing geospatial tracks
in Apache conferences) and editor of Open Geospatial APIs White Paper
[1]. Among other things, this white paper proposes a definition of "open
standard".

In my personal experience, one thing I would like to discuss is the
difference between "open source" and "open standard". The Open Source
Initiative and the Free Software Foundation Europe proposes definitions
[2],[3] that are close to open source definitions, but not identical. A
key difference is that "open standard" freedoms do not include the
freedom to modify the standard outside the standardization body. In my
experience, I found difficult to get this restriction accepted by some
open source communities (the example I have in mind is a project outside
Apache). The geospatial community can testify about the damages caused
by open source software modifying standards for their convenience,
resulting in data thousands of kilometres apart from their expected
locations because of inconsistent Coordinate Reference System
definitions. I would be interested in discussions about how to help the
use of "open standards" in "open source" projects with acceptance that
open standards are governed under rules different than the ones
specified by open source licenses.

    Martin

[1] http://docs.opengeospatial.org/wp/16-019r4/16-019r4.html
[2] https://opensource.org/osr
[3] http://fsfe.org/activities/os/def.html


Le 04/07/2018 à 13:56, Isabel Drost-Fromm a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> I have been contacted by a friend who is working on a study about the topic
> "Open Source and standardization" for the EU commission. He would like to
> be put in touch with someone at the ASF, who can provide their perspective
> wrt. to the following two questions:
>
> * Input on how the ASF views their collaboration (in whatever format) with
> standardization organisations.
> * Input from ASF projects that sit between open source licenses and IPR
> rules and governance frameworks of standardization organisations.
>
> I'm happy to put you in touch, if you have a few cycles and would like to
> share your perspective. If you are receiving this in your inbox, than
> you've been on bcc: to the mail to dev@community.apache.org because I
> believe you could have valuable input to share. Let me know if you have a
> bit of time so I can get you in touch.
>
>
> Isabel
>