Computer Society meeting notes

The Computer Society meeting about Ontopia on Tuesday was quite well attended, and had quite a bit of discussion about both the use cases and the Ontopia project in general.

The first presentation was by Lars Marius Garshol about the City of Bergen project. The slides are not posted, since they were just a shortened version of the original talk, which was also published in the TMRA 2007 proceedings.

The second presentation was about the same project, but given by Ragnar Bøe of the City of Bergen administration. Slides here (warning: Norwegian).

The third presentation was a joint presentation by Geir Ove Grønmo (of Bouvet) and Per Magnus Løvold (from the customer) about the NRK/Skole project for Norwegian National Broadcasting. Slides in Norwegian.

The final presentation was a presentation of the status of the Ontopia project two months into the project by Lars Marius Garshol. The slides are in English.

Afterwards some of the attendees moved on to beers at Myrens Verksted, as usual.

Meeting about Ontopia

The Norwegian Computer Society is arranging a meeting about Ontopia. Two customer cases (City of Bergen, and Norwegian National Broadcasting) will be presented (partly by the customers themselves), as well as a more general part about the open sourcing of the software.

The meeting is on August 25th, at the Bouvet offices in Oslo.

The kickoff meeting

The kickoff meeting for the open source project was a success with more than 20 participants from Norway, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, the US, and Germany. We also had a fair amount of interest from the Norwegian press, which has resulted in one article already, and probably more will follow.

Simen opening the meeting

There was extensive discussion at the meeting, and so the discussion actually lasted for four hours, covering a number of different issues. This post is an attempt to summarize the points made, but if anything has been left out please use the comments to remind us so that we don’t lose any of the input. The slides from the meeting can be found here.

Ownership

This issue was discussed extensively, and there seemed to be a rough consensus that having a single owner of the codebase would be better than the usual “distributed ownership” model. Bouvet agreed to get a better estimate of the likely cost of setting up a foundation in Norway, and a number of participants offered to check what the prices would be in their home countries. It was agreed that Bouvet would start raising funds from the community to cover the costs, and that a foundation would only be set up if sufficient funds could be gathered.

Bouvet would also investigate what it would take to get Ontopia accepted into the Apache Foundation and to seriously consider this route as an alternative.

License model

This was also discussed in depth, and in the end it was agreed that the Apache 2.0 License seemed the best fit. The GPL license was explicitly rejected, since it would cause serious difficulties for some Ontopia customers.

Discussion

Infrastructure

There was general agreement that the project would need a web site to promote itself, and that ontopia.net was the natural site for this, since the hosting alternatives studied so far provide rather poor site capabilities.

It was also agreed that the actual developer infrastructure would be better hosted elsewhere. Various alternatives had already been studied by Bouvet, with Google Code as the main contender. Some attendees were skeptical to this proposal, and others proposed Launchpad and Gitorious as alternatives. The conclusion was that Bouvet would study the new proposals, and that the decision would be made later, but that it would need to be made very soon to meet the July 1st deadline.

One participant proposed setting up something a la MuleForge to make it easier to contribute new modules to the project.

It was also noted that if the project is accepted by the Apache Software Foundation the necessary infrastructure will be provided by the ASF.

Further development

The news that Bouvet is investigating integrations with the Liferay and Alfresco CMSs were very positively received. One attending company revealed that they were also working on an integration with Liferay.

Some participants wanted to see a roadmap for further development, but it was agreed that it would be better for the community to develop one than for Bouvet to simply announce one. Discussion of this was therefore deferred to the mailing list.

Support

Reactions to Bouvet continuing to provide support were generally positive, and there was a general expectation that others would also be likely to want to provide support and other services around the product. A number of participants wanted to see certification of support providers, and while there was general agreement that this would be a good thing, no practical solution was found, and so the issue was put aside for the time being.

Other issues

The proposal for project governance in the slides was accepted without much discussion. One participant brought up the possibility of using the benevolent dictator model, but this foundered on the lack of an obvious candidate for the post.

One participant emphasized the importance of having a mission statement for the project to help the community agree on a common direction. There was general agreement that settling on a mission statement was best done via the mailing list.

Bouvet promised to set up a forum where discussions could be continued after the meeting, and have now done so at Google Groups.

Finally, after about four hours, the meeting was adjourned, and participants moved next door for some beer in the sunshine.

That’s all! If you have any feedback, questions, or whatever, please post it in the comments or to the mailing list.