Press Release Marble Virtual Globe Graduates Incubation

Published, following Board approval in Board_Meeting_2013-10-17.

Subject
Marble Virtual Globe Graduates OSGeo Incubation

News Date
18 October 2013

Details
OSGeo is pleased to announce that the Marble Virtual Globe project has graduated from incubation and is now a full fledged OSGeo project. Torsten Rahn, co founder and long time maintainer of Marble has been appointed as project officer.



Marble is a virtual globe and world atlas — your swiss army knife for maps. Marble is known to be used a lot in education from primary school throughout higher level classes. And it is also used in industry and research projects as a software library for displaying maps. No matter whether the topic is navigation, space science, earth science or geo-caching: Marble offers a wealth of functionality and comes with free maps which help to visualize and understand each topic. It is available for all major operating systems and it's installed on many Linux distributions by default.

Graduating incubation includes fulfilling requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance, and general good project operation. Graduation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users and the community at large an added confidence in the viability and safety of the project.

The project lead says, ''The Marble team is thrilled to be recognized as a full OSGeo project. Being part of OSGeo is important for us since OSGeo supports the collaborative development of open source geospatial software. The Marble team would like to support this mission by offering Marble as a showcase to illustrate the power of Open Source, Free Software and Free Maps. Since Marble is easy to use and fun to work with it's the perfect tool to introduce a wider audience into the world of GIS and to get people excited about it.''

Arnulf Christl mentor of the incubation process says: ''Marble Incubation was a breeze. One can immediately see that it is a well maintained project with experienced project leads and a great developer team. There were practically no open issues regarding code provenance and licensing showing that the KDE community which is the home of Marble provides a really good environment. Marble is a great addition to the OSGeo software stack because it makes accessing geospatial data and maps easy. It has already become a great tool for teachers around the world and we hope that by becoming an OSGeo project it will spread even further. ''

Congratulations to the Marble community!