A good test for OGC and OSGeo collaboration

One thing we ran into when going through GeoServer incubation (with OSGeo) was the interesting case of how to handle test data (from the CITE project) and application schemas (from every second standard the OGC produces).

The solution for GeoServer was was to point to the software notice. Here is an example from the cite wfs 1.1 README:

The CITE team engine does not offer a specific license for re-distribution, as such it falls under the general guidance provided by the OGC legal page (http://www.opengeospatial.org/legal/) and the following license:

• http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/software 

OSGeo incubation is not especially strict. Since OSGeo and the OGC have an "Memorandum of Understanding" so we figured we could talk through any confusion.

It looks like pycsw has found just such a confusion! The pycsw is a catalog implementation written in Python that is super close to finishing OSGeo incubation.

The project has been rejected from debian distribution ... because the OGC Schemas are not clearly open source. Here is the formal response from November 17th:

Dear Maintainer,

unfortunately I have to reject your package.

One result of the discussion about tinyows was that OGC schemas don't fall  under the Software Notice but the Document Notice. This makes them non free  (no modification) and tinyows had to move to non-free.

I am afraid that pycsw has to do this as well.

  Thorsten

Sounds like a great opportunity to leverage OGC and OSGeo collaboration. I am not quite sure what the answer is (schemas are open to modification, but doing so does render them incompatible with others). I guess we have the same question when distribution the EPSG dataset used for interoperability.

If you are interested in this sort of thing check out http://lists.osgeo.org/listinfo/standards .

If you are an open source developer and would like to avoid these questions consider OSGeo Incubation.

Update

From email Discussion: OGC XML schemas and FOSS4G software distribution

• Jody: Reference to OGC FAQ
• Carl: Scheduling for discussion at Barcelona TC meeting 
• Sebastiaan: Clarification conflict with Debian Free Software Guidelines
• Scott: OGC will contact Debian FTP Masters

There is now a wiki page to brain storm suggestions for Carl to take to the Technical Committee meeting. Deadline is  March 9th 2015 if you are in position to contribute.

Based on the above conversation it sounds like OGC is going to reach out to FTP Masters and resolve this issue.

A big +1 to OGC - thanks for keeping it real.