[Freegis-list] SPRING GIS software

[Gilberto Camara]

Dear FreeGIS fellows:

A recent thread on FreeGIS-list
which discusses the availability of
the SPRING source code has been brought
to our attention, and I would like to
clarify some issues.

First, we are extremely supportive
of the FreeGIS effort and free software
in general. That said,
why don´t we simply put SPRING on the
web as source code? 

As a starting point, there are legal
problems which we haven´t been able
to sort out. But these are not the only ones.

Putting software on the web, on whatever
form, implies an enormous responsibility
on the part of the producer. It does not
matter if no formal warranty is given,
the individual or the institution need
to act in a responsible fashion. If people
use your software for anything, you´d better
provide quality, or else your reputation 
will be compromised.

SPRING is a very large software product, with
hundreds of functions, and 500.000+ lines of
C++ code, produced over a period of a decade,
by a large team (more than 100 man-years, at my
last count). The project did not
begin as a free software effort, but rather as
an integrated GIS+IP freeware product for the
Brazilian and Latin American users. 

More than 10,000 people worldwide have downloaded
SPRING, and we have a strong commitment to SPRING 
as a full GIS product, capable
of supporting real-life projects, and we
have a significant number of real-world users.

Making SPRING available as open source on the web 
would require a major effort by our team in terms 
of documentation, and further effort in terms of supporting 
fellow code developers. These commitments are 
outside of our current capacity.

We have given priority to supporting users
of SPRING, producing enhanced versions, correcting bugs,
generating user documentation, preparing training courses
and maintaining the same code running on Windows, Linux 
and Solaris. These activities keep a lot of us busy all
the time.

Therefore, SPRING-product has, for us, 
a much higher priority that SPRING-open source.
I hope you appreciate the difference.

Taking everything into account, we have taken the
option of using our experience with SPRING to design
a product that´s meant to be open source. That 
product is called TERRALIB, whose first version will
be made available on-line sometime in 2001. 
Our aims in TERRALIB is to build a library for GIS
software development, and our next-generation GIS 
products will be built using it. 

All of you that develop and maintain 
open source code know how much effort is involved.
Therefore, I hope you will appreciate your cautious
approach, which is aimed at only making commitments
that we can maintain.

Regards,
Gilberto Camara
Co-ordinator for R&D in GIS
National Institute for Space Research (INPE)