IDS mailing list archives

Re: OSSIM Fedback


From: Dominique Karg <dk () ossim net>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 09:36:53 +0200


First of all my apologies for the cross-posting, I don't like it but since it's been started this way I'll answer to the three lists.

It's not my duty to enter into discussion if ossim is easy to use or not but I will freely admit that we'd love to have much more documentation that there's already available. I hope time & third party contributions will be able to close this gap in the near future, we'll see.

What made me enter this thread were what I see as accusations of intentionally writing complex code.

I must say that I have to deny this and ask Stefano sincerely for proof of this.

Ossim is a complex project, it's been evolving since more than four years now and there are quite some things we have done in the past which we don't like. Ossim has not been planned to it's current extent beforehand because we haven't had tons of money to spend and the little funding we had could only be consolidated having something working asap. This is why parts of it may be not well documented, not clearly structured and so on. But obfuscating / complicating code in purpose ? No way.

Anyway, if you have had trouble understanding the code and needed help, we've got a small but fine user base who would've been glad to help (ourselves included). I recommend you trying out the vmware image we released a couple of weeks ago, it is already setup and working and could be used by anyone to at least "learn by example".

And, in order to close this mail and clarify a last thing, most of what's included with ossim is being released under BSD license, if at any time we had intention to avoid reuse of the code we would've used a more restrictive license in the first place (like GPL), don't you think so ?

Greetings,

Dominique

Am 12.06.2006 um 23:06 schrieb Stefano Zanero:

We studied OSSIM in order to use it as a framework for implementing our
own correlation algorithms.

My experience is partially negative, in particular for the lack of
documentation on installation and software internals. Additionally, the source code is intentionally complex and undocumented, to avoid forking
or reuse... which is quite curious for a GPL software.

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