OSGeo Project Incubation Questionnaire

In order to apply for OSGeo  project incubation (and ultimately membership), we need to answer the following questions,  as posed by the OSGeo Incubation Committee.

1. Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.

Copyright in the OpenLayers project is held by MetaCarta, Inc. <labs at metacarta.com>.

2. Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

There are no other co-owners.

3. Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers

The initial Project Steering Committee is composed of the following five committers:

• Schuyler Erle <sderle at metacarta.com>
• John Frank <jrf at metacarta.com>
• Phil Lindsay <follower+openlayers at gmail.com>
• Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at metacarta.com>
• Erik Uzureau <euzuro at gmail.com>

The OpenLayers project is on point of soliciting nominations for an additional one or two steering committee members from its community mailing lists.

4. Please describe your Project.

OpenLayers is a pure JavaScript API for building map applications on the Web. OpenLayers offers the ability to display a number of different types of data in a configurable mapping interface. OpenLayers supports the display of tiled WMS, WFS, GeoRSS, ka-Map, WorldWind, and CSV data layers. OpenLayers also supports dragging, zooming, tiling, markers, popup bubbles, a variety of customizable map controls, keyboard shortcuts, a robust event handling mechanism, and more. Every part of OpenLayers is intended to be configurable.

5. Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

Much like Autodesk with their MapGuide project, we feel that OpenLayers stands the greatest chance of success as an Open Source project if development of the project is sponsored by more than one interested party. We hope that OSGeo membership will help attract users and developers by serving as an impartial home for the project. Additionally, OpenLayers is designed to supplement or complement other would-be member projects, such as MapServer and GeoServer, and we hope that membership will benefit OSGeo by adding another piece to the "stack". We feel that OpenLayers offers a substantially different take on the concept of a "web mapping API" (i.e. an API, rather than an application in and of itself) from other candidate projects, such as Mapbender or Mapbuilder, and is worthy of inclusion on that basis.

6. Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

OpenLayers is a client-side JavaScript library. OpenLayers can be run from openlayers.org or installed on a user's webserver.

7. Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

OpenLayers incorporates components from Prototype.js and Rico, both Open Source JavaScript projects. The OpenLayers project uses MapServer as the WMS for its "default" layer. The OpenLayers team also has been in contact with the development teams of Mapbuilder and ka-Map, and has discussed the possibility of sharing common code between our projects. We have also discussed seriously the idea of merging our efforts with that of ka-Map, although those discussions are still ongoing.

8. Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

MetaCarta is the primary corporate sponsor of OpenLayers.

9. Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

OpenLayers is distributed under the BSD license. See http://openlayers.org/dev/license.txt.

10. Is there already a beta or official release?

Yes. Please see http://openlayers.org/download/ for more details.

11. What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

The project was started in response to MetaCarta's need for a reliable Open Source web mapping toolkit on which to build further applications.

12. Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, etc.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?

OpenLayers supports OGC WMS and WFS requests, as well as the informal GeoRSS Simple standard.

13. Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

To our knowledge, the code is free of patents and trademarks. We have obtained contributor agreements from all patch contributors to date.

14. How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

In addition to the four main project developers, we have one website maintainer, and have received contributor agreements from four other developers, all of whom have sent in patches or new code.

15. How many people have commit access to the source code respository?

The five people listed in answer (3).

16. Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

Based on the web server logs for openlayers.org, we estimate that, as of 7 September 2006, the OpenLayers.js library has been accessed from the website over 27k times from nearly 13k unique IP addresses. Unfortunately, we do not have server logs for Subversion checkouts, which we believe to be the most popular way of accessing the project's source code, but the full source distribution has been downloaded nearly 500 times in different versions since our initial source release on 5 July. We might therefore conservatively estimate that perhaps as many as 10k people have used OpenLayers in one form or another, perhaps in as many as 100 projects or websites.

17. What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?

OpenLayers has potential appeal to any user or developer that wants to display a map or build a map-related application on the Web.

18. If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation? ! In addition to the reasons given in answer (5), OpenLayers currently enjoys infrastructure contributed by MetaCarta, but MetaCarta has made no definite commitments about how long it intends to continue to support the project in this way. OSGeo membership would offer us a stable alternative for hosting if-and-when.

19. Does the project include an automated build and test?

Yes, OpenLayers includes Python/shell build scripts, and we use the Test.AnotherWay framework for unit testing. At present, OpenLayers has over 500 automated unit tests.

20. What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)

The OpenLayers library itself is written in JavaScript, while the build tools are written in Python and UNIX shell.

21. What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

English is the dominant written language of the project.

22. What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?

The current source release is 228K in tarball form. The current hosted API release is a single 161K JavaScript file, which compresses to 37K when served with gzip compression. The latest version of the OpenLayers source release was downloaded 150 times in its first week, while the hosted API version was served almost 5500 times in that same week.