[OSM-dev] Sol Katz OSGEO award

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 09:43:20AM +0200, Corey Burger wrote:
> On 8/15/07, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 03:26:36PM +0200, Milo van der Linden wrote:
> > > I think OpenStreetMap is a perfect candidate for this award!
> > >
> > > http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Sol_Katz_Award
> >
> > "The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS)
> > is awarded annually by OSGeo to *individuals who have demonstrated
> > leadership* in the GFOSS community."
> >
> > OpenStreetMap is not an individual. If you were to nominate someone, you
> > would need to nominate a *person*, not the organization.
> 
> Shall we nominate one of the people from OSM then? Steve? Imi? Richard F?

I see all those people as being wonderful leaders of the OpenStreetMap
project, and in some cases perhaps even leadership in the open geo data
community -- but I don't see OSM, or any of those individuals, as
demonstrating leadership in the Geographic Free Open Source Software
community. 

FrankW (a previous winner of the award) has been working on a single,
unified data abstraction layer for geodata for 10 years. Markus Neteler
has been working on GRASS for many years as well, and has moved the
software to being the essential Open Source GIS analysis project.  

I don't think that OSM has its goals in open source software
development: the attitude taken by the OSM project of "OSM is not GIS"
seems representative here, and I'd say that's evidence enough that
nominations for OSM developers for the Sol Katz award does not make much
sense, from my point of view.
 
Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta