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satellogic / telluric

telluric is a Python library to manage vector and raster geospatial data in an interactive and easy way
MIT License
87 stars 18 forks source link

Collaboration with PyTroll #14

Open djhoese opened 6 years ago

djhoese commented 6 years ago

Hi,

I couldn't find any information in your documentation about a chat room or mailing list so I thought I'd make an issue here. I'm a core developer on the PyTroll team (http://pytroll.github.io/). I saw your email on the python-announce mailing list and thought we could discuss collaboration. Your package is very interesting and you have some similar features to our package SatPy (https://github.com/pytroll/satpy) but you seem to lean on the GIS side of things where SatPy is currently focused on reading satellite raster data from various satellite imager data files. You may also be interested in our PyResample library (https://github.com/pytroll/pyresample) which can help resample data to uniform grids (a.k.a. areas). Lastly your orbit-predictor library seems very similar to our pyorbital package (https://github.com/pytroll/pyorbital).

I'm not sure where or how we can collaborate right now, but wanted to make our projects known to each other so we can collaborate in the future if/when it makes sense. I'll also tag @mraspaud here who is another core developer on the PyTroll team.

astrojuanlu commented 6 years ago

Hi @djhoese,

Thanks a lot for reaching out! You're right that there's no official chat or mailing list (yet), but it's perfectly OK to have this conversation over GitHub issues.

We are glad that the PyTroll folks noticed our efforts. We were of course aware of the project and the potential overlap - I cannot speak on behalf of my whole team or the company, but undoubtedly the GPLv3 license played a role :)

Nevertheless, we would be glad to find ways of collaboration between the projects. We just open sourced telluric so there are lots of things that we want to do, including adding documentation, expanding its feature set towards distributed processing, and improving visualization, among others. It would be great to have a chat at some Python conference, in or outside Europe (where I'm personally based).

Pinging @luciotorre, who can say more about long term vision for the project.

djhoese commented 6 years ago

Sounds good. Do you or your colleagues ever attend atmospheric science conferences like those hosted by EUMETSAT? A lot of the pytroll developers live in Scandinavia and attend meteorological conferences in Europe.

As for the license, we have considered changing it in the past, everything from BSD/MIT to LGPL. Every time someone has brought it up to us (organizations thinking their lawyers wouldn't like it, etc) it turns out when they looked in to it it wasn't an issue. I guess it depends if you work for a company that needs to use SatPy in a commercial product. SatPy directly competes with some commercial closed-source software and we wanted to stop them from adding their own features and not contributing them back. Bottom line, we're willing to discuss it. @mraspaud may have some additional thoughts on this.

astrojuanlu commented 6 years ago

We have not yet attended those conferences, but that might change in the future.

Regarding the license, we respect your decision of using strong copyleft and understand your motivations. I definitely don't want to discuss which one is better :) and acknowledge that there are pros and cons. But of course, if SatPy changed to a more permissive license, we could reuse more code and have a closer collaboration.

astrojuanlu commented 5 years ago

Related: https://twitter.com/PyTrollOrg/status/1051902634783838208

mraspaud commented 5 years ago

Just replying to this thread, way later, sorry. I just wanted to mention that pyresample is in LGPL license, if that makes a difference.

Regarding the developer week, it would be the perfect occasion to dive into pytroll if you are interested !