Thanks to Jason Birch recently calling on the FDO developers mailing list, it’s getting loudly about idea of joining the Google Summer of Code 2007 with Feature Data Objects project.
I strongly support Jason’s idea because with SoC, Google is giving a great opportunity for Open Source projects to boost their development and gain new features or prototypes ready for next steps toward usability.
Jason posted a nice proposal of features for SoC. Here are my favorites:
- 64-bit platform support
FDO is not officially nor unofficially supported and as latest reports indicate some substantial work is required.
- Command line tools
I’m a big fun of GDAL and OGR command line utilities. I think it’s a great idea about having similar tools for FDO: fdoinfo, fdo2fdo, etc. Having ogr2ogr and fdo2fdo, a user would be able to pipe vector data in any direction :-). Another utility I’m thinking about is fdoinfo, FDO equivalent of ogrinfo from the OGR package.
- Mac OS X support
Yes, FDO is not supported on this platform. The SoC 2007 could be a nice opportunity to change this situation.
If you have any idea of new features you’d like to see in the Feature Data Objects, please propose them on the fdo-internals list or just put here as a comment and I’ll forward them to the FDO team.
I’m wondering if there is any motion in OSGeo to become a mentoring organization for Google SoC and if such idea is reasonable in any way.
