The Open Source GIS Community Starts to Mature
Evolution happens. This was the third consecutive year that I have attended the
MapServer User’s Meeting. Each conference has been electric (really, people are
running out of appropriate adjective to describe the thing). Buzz, excitement,
momentum, cool stuff, connections, and egoboo are all copiously exchanged and
generated at the thing. The first conference was all about realizing you could get
a significantly-sized group of Open Source GIS hackers together. The second
conference in Ottawa was about confirmation of the first, and the Open Source
GIS community started to gain more consciousness. The third, IMO, demonstrated how the
OSGIS community is growing up.
Some examples of how the community is growing up include Frank
receiving the Sol Katz award, the slew (ok, maybe 4 isn’t quite a slew yet) of books
that are starting to show up, and the group thinking about how to circle the wagons
should external pressures (patents, groups with competing agendas, big money) start to
cause trouble.
Frank’s reception of the award (congrats Frank!) demonstrates how the community respects
all of the work the trailblazer(s) have done that have made the formation of the community
possible. I won’t embarrass Frank with any more platitudes, but work like his, Sol’s and
many other pioneers clearly make the whole thing tick. The recognition of this fact by the
community means that it will probably work to grow beyond disparate embryonic projects into
a software ecosystem of (hopefully) non-redundant, mutually-supporting software systems.
There are already some good examples of this, and the OGC work is the ether that makes much
of the collaboration possible, IMO.
Books allow the community to preserve its history, transmit its identity, and
most importantly, to scale. Developers develop. While they are generally pretty good at
describing the intention of a new feature or the steps to follow a technique, they often
don’t have much time for producing documentation that can clearly extract all of their internalized
knowledge about the subject. Authors, whether learning it for the first time or coming from
a perspective that does not worry about every detail (which a developer must), provide relief
to developers. More users can then come into the fray (the support load on the developers
lessens) and the developers can continue doing what they do — write software.
Serendipitously, Dirk-Willem van Gulik of the Apache Software Foundation presented some cautionary tales for the community.
While the software stacks and communities of both Apache and OSGIS have significant
differences, there are some similarities in the problems (legal and otherwise) that
both have to potential to face. As the OSGIS community continues to grow, it needs to
plan and think about these issues, and Dirk’s wonderful presentation gave the community
a language with which to communicate about them.