OSGeo signs Memorandum of Understanding with OGC

Memorandum of Understanding
In Valencia, Spain, at the December Technical Committee meetings of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), the OGC and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate in advancing open geospatial standards (OGC's mission) and Open Source geospatial software and data (OSGeo's mission).

Mark Reichardt, CEO and President of the OGC, explained: Openness benefits markets. Vendors of proprietary software have found that today's more open and complex "business ecosystem," which includes both Open Source software and open standards, is good for their businesses. It's also good for technology users. It makes sense for the OGC to work with the OSGeo."''

Open Source software is software that has been designed and developed in an open, community process and is release under an open and free license. The OGC's open standards are similarly developed in an open, community process, but they are specifications (for interfaces, encodings and best practices), not software. All OGC standards are available for free (other than for example ISO standards).

Arnulf Christl, President of OSGeo, said: We look forward to collaborating with the OGC to identify open source technologies that can be used as reference implementations for OGC standards and to identify standards requirements that result from our open source geospatial software development programs.

The MoU provides for the assignment of up to six one-year Individual Memberships in the OGC. Memberships will be selected by OSGeo and are subject to OGC qualifications for Individual Membership.

Membership overlap
Many individuals, companies, universities and public administrations involved with OSGeo and Open Source software are also regular members of the OGC. The full list is available at the OGC web site. A lot of interaction and communication is maintained through these members. Especially innovative new projects with no existing infrastructure or a regular commercial champion did not have a chance to participate in the internal OGC processes. Both the OGC and OSGeo have a mutual interest in facilitating this collaboration and have agreed to allow for six OGC Individual Memberships to be used by OSGeo members.

Currently the following people participate in OGC using the Individual Membership slots awarded to OSGeo through this MoU:
 * Volker Mische
 * Gerald Fenoy
 * Jeff McKenna

Link

 * OGC Press release: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/944