AW: Status of OpenSlide support

[Martin Weihrauch]

Thank you very much for your insights! 

I think that it should be possible on this list to collect some money, especially from the companies to make 1-5 work for all of us.

So, first of all, we need to secure funds to go either:

a) My company Smart In Media could hire a full time developer for OpenSlide to drive the library forward with the clear goal to keep it open source under LGPL.
b) There is someone here on the list, who would be able to work x% of his time as a paid developer.

My company could provide €5,000 / year. 
Who else can add to the pot?

Martin

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Mahadev Satyanarayanan <satya at cs.cmu.edu> 
Gesendet: Montag, 25. März 2019 15:50
An: Adam Goode <adam at spicenitz.org>; Martin Weihrauch <m.weihrauch at smartinmedia.com>
Cc: openslide-users at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Betreff: Re: Status of OpenSlide support

Hi Adam and Martin,
   Is #5 (inability to do commit changes without the help of one of the original
developers) really the showstopper at present?   I don't have that impression, but
if that's the case it is easily fixed by us granting permission to specific,
carefully-vetted individuals.   We don't have a community-developed
process in place, but for a small number of individuals it shouldn't be a big deal.  If you can convince Adam Goode, Benjamin Gilbert, and Jan Harkes that you can be trusted with this role (and they tell me so), 
I can work out the mechanism.   There is no need to create a fork just to
be able to commit changes to the OpenSlide code base. 

My understanding is that it is #1 and #2 (lack of time and expertise) that is the limiting factor to OpenSlide evolution at the moment.  Adam's advice on #1 to #4 are right on target for  addressing that.

 Cheers
           -- Satya

On Monday 25 March 2019 10:23:15 Adam Goode wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> Benjamin and I are are both quite busy with other things. I cannot 
> speak for Benjamin, but in my case I am not able to take money to work 
> on side projects like this. It is likely that Benjamin has a similar situation.
> 
> Given this information, how should you move forward? The typical 
> advice I give to organizations interested in OpenSlide is this:
> 
> 1. Please identify someone in your organization to work on OpenSlide. 
> This can be someone in your development group or research group, or 
> possibly even a grad student in some circumstances.
> 2. Explicitly allocate some amount of time for this person to work on 
> OpenSlide (perhaps 15-20%, possibly more while getting started).
> 3. Introduce this person to the list and me.
> 4. I will provide some of my time to answer questions and give some 
> help getting started.
> 5. Depending on the circumstances, we may be able to grant permissions 
> to this person to let them approve pull requests and do other things. 
> This would be a good outcome, though I would have to discuss with 
> Benjamin and the CMU folks exactly what criteria we would use for granting this.
> 
> Note that, completely independently, you can fork the project and make 
> whatever changes you like. I encourage this! But please try to publish 
> your changes as we have done, and do so under the same license so that 
> we could eventually merge changes back someday. Forking may still be 
> the correct thing to do even if we do steps #1-4 above, since I can't 
> currently say what the criteria for #5 would be.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 2:07 AM Martin Weihrauch < 
> m.weihrauch at smartinmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> > Dear Benjamin:
> >
> > I wanted to inquire, what the status of OpenSlide is. The last 
> > commit is almost 1 year old and there are some important pull 
> > requests (problem with bif, Motic and introduction of VMIC) waiting to be introduced.
> >
> > I guess that you may have not the time to maintain it currently, 
> > which would be sad and a problem for so many of us, who rely on it.
> >
> > Maybe some of the community here (me included) could throw in some 
> > money and we could pay you or someone else e. g. a quarter or a half 
> > of his/her salary to further maintain and expand this important 
> > library, which you created.
> >
> > Looking forward to hearing from you.
> >
> > Martin
> > _______________________________________________
> > openslide-users mailing list
> > openslide-users at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> > https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/openslide-users
> >
>