geotools provenance review - STEMLab/geotools GitHub Wiki

This page gathers up the provenance review performed from 2006-2008 on the geotools library.

This work was undertaken as an OSGeo incubation requirement.

Summary

  • We removed ArcSDE and Oracle support from the library due to difficulties distribution the jars on which this functionality depended. In addition we shut off prior downloads of the library that contained this work. This functionality was restored after "stub jars" were created by hand (these jars are non functional; operating similar to a C header file allowing code to be compiled but not executed).
  • Frank has helped address the concern of EPSG derrived data products, and we have had discussion on the integration of public domain code with our LGPL license requirements.
  • All headers in the library were assigned to the "GeoTools PMC" - an entity with no legal existence. We arranged to transfer copyright to the OSGeo foundation.
  • Remaining issues can be found in our issue tracker under GeoTools License Issues. The majority of these known issues concern checking where test case data originated from.

Provenance Review

Developers Guide

Users Guide

Source Code

The review process has being integrated into the community development practice, as a step in making modules supported. A review.apt file (in Apache's Almost Plain Text format) now is provided for each module and is considered part of the source code. Initial review was completed by Jody Garnett August 7th, 2006. Adrian Custer has lead the a second review in July, 2008.

http://maven.geotools.fr/reports/

For each module you can locate a report - for example:

Modules are considered CLEAN if the origin of all files was confirmed as our own work or appropriated under a suitable license so there were no outstanding issues blocking distribution under the LGPL. All source code files were examined for their headers and mixed headers or conflicts in copyright were flagged. All data files or other files (such as icon images) were assessed to establish our right to redistribute them if they were not our own files. These reports include links to Jira issues raised during the review.

The following issues apply to all modules:

See further below for the status of the various JIRA tasks which have been filed. Several of them have already been closed.

Library modules

Plugin modules

Extension modules

These modules are built on top of the geotools library and add additional analysis and functionality around the abstractions captured by the core library.

Demo modules

These files are used as teaching aids. We are considering releasing them as public domain to aliviate any initial adotpion concerns. They are all available under a public domain license.

Unsupported modules

These extensions and plug-ins work with the GeoTools library, but do not yet meet their QA and Provenance Review checks. While this is mostly to prevent duplication of development effort, the unsupported modules that have completed a provenance review can be distributed for feedback.

Build Tools

These are internal to the library and not distributed.

Spike

Experiments and Summer of Code projects sometimes take place in an experimental spike directory.

We are not intersted in distributing this code; but we have found a couple issues anyways:

Known Issues

The main issue tracking the rest is: JIRA GEOT-1873, these are all shown below.

All issues should have been filed under the admin component.

Actions Taken

The following actions have been taken in response to issues raised during the incubation process.

Turning Off Downloads

After a public email on the GeoServer list, we have chosen to turn off historical downloads of the geotools platform, and produced a new download that does not contain ArcSDE support.

We may choose to turn historical downloads on again, or issue a patch for each stable branch, depending on community needs and involvement.

Contact EPSG Providers

Frank was kind enough to contact the providers of the EPSG dataset and inform them of our difficulties in delivering the content verbatium for databases such as HSQL.

Multi License code

Some code has been donated to the the project under a range of conditions, we have chosen to include the appropriate information in a series of LICENSE.TXT files included with each binary.

We will review these files to discuss any specific needs that must be addressed in client application code, or included documentation:

  • The User Guide will credit each license
  • The User Guide will be packaged and included with each release