Incubation request: PROJ

[kbevers]

The PROJ project would like to formally request incubation into OSGeo. The incubation questionnaire is filled out below. I believe the project fullfils all the ​project evaluation criteria. Michael Smith has [ expressed willingness to mentor the project during the incubation process ​https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/proj/2019-March/008289.html].

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

Kristian Evers <kreve@…>

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

Howard Butler, howard@… Frank Warmerdam, frank@…

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

Kristian Evers, kreve@…, Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency Howard Butler, howard@…, Hobu Inc. Charles Karney, charles@…, SRI International Thomas Knudsen, thokn@…, Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency Even Rouault, even.rouault@…, Spatialys Frank Warmerdam, frank@…, Planet Labs Inc.

4. Please describe your Project.

PROJ is a generic coordinate transformation software that transforms geospatial coordinates from one coordinate reference system (CRS) to another. This includes cartographic projections as well as geodetic transformations.

PROJ includes command line applications for easy conversion of coordinates from text files or directly from user input. In addition to the command line utilities PROJ also exposes an application programming interface, or API in short. The API lets developers use the functionality of PROJ in their own software without having to implement similar functionality themselves.

PROJ started purely as a cartography application letting users convert geodetic coordinates into projected coordinates using a number of different cartographic projections. Over the years, as the need has become apparent, support for datum shifts has slowly worked its way into PROJ as well. Today PROJ supports more than a hundred different map projections and can transform coordinates between datums using all but the most obscure geodetic techniques.

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

PROJ is already a community member of OSGeo and used by most, if not all, C/C++ based OSGeo projects. A foundational library such as PROJ should benefit from the full support of OSGeo, allowing the project to support it's downstream brothers and sisters better.

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

Library, command line utility.

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

PROJ is a dependency for most, if not all, of the C/C++ based OSGeo projects. Additionally, a number of projects (likely in the hundreds) from outside the realm of OSGeo depends on PROJ for coordinate transformations

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

A few of the PSC members represent companies that has commercial interest in PROJ. Either because they rely on the software in their production or because they offer development on PROJ as a service in their consultancy business.

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

PROJ is released under the MIT license. Previous to version 4.3 of PROJ the code was considered public domain by the United States of America.

​https://github.com/OSGeo/proj.4/blob/master/COPYING

10. Is there already a beta or official release?

Yes, multiple. At the time of writing the most recent version is 6.0.0.

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

Government. PROJ was originally developed by Gerald I. Evenden at the USGS in the 1980's. Today PROJ is used by actors in both higher education, government and the private sector.

12. Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) 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?

PROJ support the Well-Known Text and Well-Known Text2 described in the ISO 19111 standard on "Referencing by coordinates". I am not aware of any official certification. To the best of my knownledge PROJ is the first application to implement WKT2, so it can in some sense be regarded as a reference implementation.

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

Yes.

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

Releases typically has between 10 and 20 contributors. Usually, the majority of the work is done by a handful of regular contributors.

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

7.

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

The number of direct users of PROJ is likely rather low, but when counting indirect users, such as users of GDAL, PostGIS and QGIS, the number is likely in the millions.

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

Government, commercial, academia.

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?

N/A - PROJ already uses OSGeo infrastructure.

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

Yes. PROJ include both autools and CMake build systems, has a test coverage of about 85%. Tests are run on a number of CI targets for each commit to the master branch.

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

C and C++.

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

English.

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 6.0.0 release is 2.3MB. The accompanying datum grid package is 6.3MB. Additionally, the optional grid packages for Europe and North America are both around 20MB. The optional grid package for Oceania is 70MB.