The open source geospatial community today announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It will also serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit....The foundation will not require that OSGEO software projects to be licensed under any one particular open source license, but will require that all OSGEO software be released under an open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The long term goal is to encourage licenses that allow the different foundation projects to work better together and permit for code exchange among them. The foundation will implement contribution and intellectual property policies designed to avoid the inclusion of proprietary or patented code in OSGEO projects. Foundation projects are focused on interoperability - both with one another at the library level, and with other proprietary and open source projects through the use of open standards. The foundation will also be pursuing goals beyond software development, such as promoting more open access to government produced spatial data, which is a major problem outside of North America.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/07/2006 11:32:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
