Mapping Hacks

Today, representatives of various Free and Open Source geospatial software
projects, including MapServer, GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, GRASS, GeoServer, GeoTools,
Mapbender, Ka-Map and several others met in Chicago today to found the Open
Source Geospatial Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting and promoting the development of F/OSS GIS. Following on the heels
of the controversial “MapServer Foundation” announcement prompted by
Autodesk’s release of their MapGuide product under an Open Source license, the
meeting — also supported by Autodesk — attempted to bring together
representatives of a wider community to see if there was common ground for an
organization to support and concentrate all of our efforts. Sure enough, there
was plenty of common ground.

In fact, there was enough consensus between the 25 participants in the live
meeting in at the Westin O’Hare plus the couple dozen people who participated
virtually via IRC to agree to start a foundation, agree on what to call it (!),
agree on common goals for the foundation, come up with a long list of
guidelines, and appoint a board of directors. It didn’t hurt that many of the
interested software projects have already been cooperating informally for
years, nor did it hurt that a lot of the issues have already been hashed and
rehashed out on the MapServer-Users and the MSF-Discuss mailing lists.

It didn’t even hurt that Autodesk was involved — quite the contrary! In
spite of the somewhat nasty stir they caused in the F/OSS GIS community a few
months back when they asked prominent community members to sign an NDA, and
then announced that their unrelated MapGuide product was going to adopt
MapServer’s name and be released as Open Source, it seems to me that Gary Lang
and the others at Autodesk have listened to the community, been true to their
word, and are participating in the community’s process as real team players.
The fact that they provided the infrastructural support for this meeting –
and also offered the embryonic Foundation a crucial and quite substantial
startup donation with basically no strings attached — served the impetus for
the community coming together as it has, rather than just continuing to talk
about it. The meeting also benefitted significantly from the expert
guidance of Brian Behelendorf, and his hard-won lessons from the Apache
Software Foundation.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo for short, will seek to
provide roughly the same kind of function for the F/OSS GIS community that the
Apache Software Foundation provides for the Apache development and user
communities, with the primary difference being that, where Apache started as a
single project and then branched out, the OSGeo Foundation is attempting to
weld together the overlapping but sometimes disparate interests of different
projects with different communities. The Foundation will hopefully serve as an
outreach and advocacy organization for the community; a forum for improving
cross-project collaboration; a unified professional front for large government
and corporate users; a source of shared infrastructure, like code and
documentation repositories; and as a legal entity to help protect developers
and users of Open Source geospatial software against greedy patent lawsuits or
unscrupulous license infringements. In general, the object of the Foundation
will be, in the words of Mark Lucas of OSSIM, to “help us do what we love” –
which, for most of us, is building useful tools for digital cartography and
geospatial analysis, and solving interesting problems with them.

The exact guidelines under which projects will be able to participate in the
Foundation are still being worked out, but the projects that have already
expressed a definite interest in participating include GRASS, GDAL/OGR,
MapGuide, and Mapbender, with other projects we all know and love to hopefully
soon follow. The interim board of directors selected today will include Arnulf
Christl (Mapbender / ccgis.de), Chris Holmes (GeoServer), Gary Lang (Autodesk /
MapGuide), Markus Neteler (GRASS), and Frank Warmerdam (too numerous to
mention), with another four members to be selected by the community
subsequently. This is an illustrious group indeed — *and* a great bunch of
people to sit around and have a few beers with, to boot. (What more can you ask
for in a non-profit foundation board of directors?)

An enormous number of questions were answered today, but a lot of interesting
challenges remain for the community members. Will the Foundation be able to
effectively bring together the heretofore somewhat separate C and Java-based
F/OSS GIS development communities? Will the Foundation live up to its mandate
to be a truly international organization? How can the Foundation reconcile the
different histories and working practices — and licenses — of its constituent
projects? Will the Foundation take a positive stand on the subject of open
geodata access? Will the Foundation be able to take on the role of organizing
the annual Open Source Geo / MUM / FOSS4GIS conferences? Will the Foundation
find independent sources of funding, and possibly be able to pass sponsorships
on to its member projects? Ultimately, will the Foundation serve as a means of
helping to build infrastructure and capacity, and reduce duplicated efforts, so
that we can get on with the business of writing good software and
documentation, and solving interesting problems?

For my part, having written or helped write about or advocated for so many of
these great software projects, in Mapping Hacks and elsewhere, it was
really wonderful to be present to see luminaries from each sit down around a
table (and an IRC channel) and agree to move forward together for a common
cause. I mean, damn.

If you’re interested in finding out more, the OSGeo Foundation website will
eventually be at www.osgeo.org, but as of
this writing, there’s nothing there but a DNS landing page. I’d point you to
the existing MapServer
Foundation, but the information there is mostly out of date — although you
can sign up for the MSF-Discuss mailing list, which will probably be the best
source of information and discussion into the near-to-medium-term future. For
now, about all I can recommend is Gary Sherman’s IRC logs from the meeting, which
actually contain a wealth of detail on the discussions and decision making
processes of the Foundation’s initial participants.

It’s been a long but productive day. I’m going to bed.

Posted in community, osgeo |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.