OSGeo Vision for UN-GGIM 2

Background

In 2006 OSGeo set out to support and promote Open Source geospatial software development. The world at that time had changed rapidly by the unprecedented success of other major software initiatives using an Open Source model, notably Linux, BSD Unix, Apache, Mozilla and an ecosystem of software tools including GNU, perl, bind and others. The ability of software developers to contribute to common source code, and to form functional communities focused on rapid, state-of-the-art improvements to crucial infrastructure had changed the rules of the game. Private sector companies, academia, government and the military were taking notice of the huge success of these projects, and beginning to change their thinking about how to benefit from this model. In particular, the strategic decision of IBM to support Linux, against its own proprietary operating systems marked a watershed moment in the adoption of an Open Source development and governance model for software by a Fortune 500 corporation.

The application of standardized licensing to source code and to new contributions had proved critical to long term stability in very large infrastructure software projects. OSGeo from its inception applied rigorous and documented criteria to previously somewhat ad-hoc projects. The necessary crucible for the next generation of major advancements in geospatial software was a combination of the ability to combine and grow common source code libraries, a rigorous legal framework, and support for community infrastructure. OSGeo set out to provide all of these.

OSGeo was initially formed with several of the best-of-breed Open Source geospatial software projects of the day : MapServer, GDAL/OGR, GRASS, and in the Java world, GeoTools. Note that the initial roster of projects, and subsequent additions, covers the spectrum of server-side data storage, plug-in libraries for data transformation and format conversion, presentation of data on the web, as well as traditional desktop GIS analysis.

Very quickly, OSGeo participants realized that geospatial data itself was both crucial to the software efforts and may also achieve similar benefits in an Open Source environment. OpenStreetMap had been founded in 2004, following the massive success of Wikipedia, roughly founded in 2001, and both were expanding rapidly with unexpectedly high quality results. OSGeo started thinking about how the role of government might fit with the role of the independent Open Source software development world in geodata.

Current Development

OSGeo is a world-wide organization operating on the Internet and through local chapters and interest groups. OSGeo operates common hosting and communications infrastructure, including:

 - more than 150 active mailing lists, 
 - 25 project development instances using TRAC
 - more than 400,000 unique visitors per month
 - more than 700 active source code committers
 - source code base of more than 100 million lines of code

OSGeo Local Chapters operate in more than 25 Countries around the world. It is safe to say there are participants in every industrialized nation world-wide, and good representation from a handful of smaller countries in the third world.

Since the founding of OSGeo, the Open Source software model has grown exponentially by every measurement metric. The role of Open Source geospatial software in the future, be it five years, ten years and beyond, is unquestionable.