LizardTech Report 2007

Michael Gerlek, LizardTech

LizardTech has been a supporter and a sponsor of OSGeo since its inception, and in 2007 we were pleased to see OSGeo continue to evolve and grow and mature. From its beginnings, OSGeo has been about building a community, not just a repository of software.

This past year, we've seen the birth of a number of OSGeo chapters, based around communities of regional interest or common language. The Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source (CUGOS) formed here in Seattle back in February, meeting every month here at LizardTech's offices in Seattle -- it's nice to have a chance to meet other open source geo folks face-to-face for a change, instead of just trading emails and IRC messages.

We were also very fortunate this year to meet the global OSGeo community at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria. LizardTech sent five engineers up for the week, and all came home with a much better appreciation of the broad set of libraries and applications we can build on, as well as the people who work on them.

For many years, LizardTech has relied on open source software as one of our strategies for more effective development of robust software. We're proud to associate ourselves with OSGeo, and look forward to another year of collaboration and growth.