Hobu, Inc.

After our initial Feb 4th meeting, things have been happening quickly. In fact, I think one of our biggest hurdles is that we are running up against Brook’s Law, ie communication costs increase with the square of the number of participants. Many folks are talking about many things all at once. The amount of brain and network bandwidth required to follow everything has been pretty daunting. An daily inbox with a 100+ messages related to OSGeo is a significant commitment just by itself.

One concern that I have is organizationally whether or not OSGeo has the potential to wither under the weight of the communication load. A corporation has the nice advantage of being hierarchical, for better or worse. OSGeo is a “by consensus” organization, but democracy is expensive from a communcation perspective. In the intial bootstrapping, lots of communication cost is placed on the board and many consensus decisions must be made by it.

Getting there (wherever we define “there” to be) is going to be challenging and a lot of work for the board. The board is working to delegate to various committees within OSGeo, but geometric growth of committees only increases the number of things clammoring for their attention. Add in many projects individually chirping for attention, and things can start to get out of hand.

It is my hope that after the mad rush, things start to settle down into a less hectic mode. Part of this rush is finding out what organizational structure works the best for us, as we are attempting something that hasn’t really been done before (take a bunch of open source software projects under different licenses and bring them under one tent). We’re learning though. Openly.

My initial outrage in that post was about LizardTech swallowing up an infant company called Mapping Science that was working to develop the GeoJP2 standard. My complaints were that the move was intended to create confusion in the market place and limit the uptake of JPEG2000 in the GIS market place. To some extent this may have been true (confusion about JPEG2000 and the difference between a compressor and a format), but the marketplace has changed quite a bit since then.

An interesting data point is that very soon after my little weblog post, the DSDK (decompression software development kit) became free for use. So while they are now generally available, they also use very old compilers and aren’t available for all platforms. Give us an inch and we want a mile!

Reptiles don’t generate their own body heat

LizardTech chose to compete with their technology in the courtroom rather than in the cubicle. They agressively pursued ER Mapper as far as they could in their patent dispute rather than settling or out-competing them with technology. Their move to per-MB compression fees of their next generation of technology sucked all of the wind out of their existing format, pushing people to look for ways to get around it — compressing less MBs, not upgrading, or looking to things like ECW.

LizardTech 2.0

Things appear to be changing though. A really curious development is one of the initial members of the OSGeo Foundation is Michael Gerlek from LizardTech. The LizardTech toolkit has been a big consumer of Open Source software (as I’ve noticed from debugging library linking issues related to popular toolkits like GDAL and libtiff). ER Mapper has already released its software in an Open Source-friendly way (dual-licensed actually). Is LizardTech preparing to do the same?

LizardTech seems to have ended their appeals process against ER Mapper. Is this geospatial industry saga really over?

I hope LizardTech has turned the corner and is working hard to win back the trust of developers and GIS practicioners, make their lives easier, and make LizardTech technology be a sensible, reasonable, sustainable, and affordable choice for imagery compression. Their recent move into JPEG2000 as a primary format is a great one, and I am excited that they are working to separate the compressor from the format in the way that they are. I am hopeful that LizardTech’s involvement in OSGeo might mean some Open Source LizardTech stuff as well.