Unfortunately, my wife of 37 years passed away, unexpectedly, a couple of weeks ago. As you can imagine, I've been surrounded by friends and family since that time. I remain very positive about life and am grateful for the life that we had together. I think you will all understand that I have to take care of many obligations and I won't be able to attend tomorrow's board meeting. I will re-engage shortly and will be at both FOSS4g NA and also in London, I also plan on supporting FedGeo day in Washington DC later this week.
I've thrown myself back into work at the best company (RadiantBlue) that I have ever had the pleasure to work for. This is very therapeutic for me. Things like this cause you to stand back and re-assess your life and your priorities. I've made the decision that I'm in a fairly unique position with OSSIM/OMAR, the US Defense Intelligence Complex and open source software. What you may not know is that my team has made their living developing these baselines under government funding for these agencies. This began with little studies, experiments, but has evolved to our OMAR integration that is now embedded and used in critical operations. I am not at liberty to give out exact numbers, but in 2012 our Open Technology Division had revenue of over $10M in development, maintenance, and operations around OMAR. The core team has been funded for 12 years. As an engineer and scientist I've always started with technological trends and projected them forward to ideal conditions. We all understand the vector that Open Technology is on. If you think about the state of paralysis in the US Government, the need for dramatic budget cuts and technology outsourcing - it is clear to me that there is an opportunity to dramatically change the way these government agencies function. Open source software is ITAR compliant - it is therefore easy to replicate these technologies in other countries around the world. I stand with one foot in both the classified and unclassified worlds. Most of the interesting stuff has shifted to the outside, I go to Google and twitter to investigate almost everything. Imagine a world where intelligence is open and shared. I believe it would be a better, safer place. Our software technologies can provide basic infrastructure. I'm installing OMAR in Europe in a couple of weeks, it has already been installed in a number of other locations around the world by coalition forces, maritime awareness projects, and various academic pursuits. OMAR basically indexes and processes remote sensing data on demand. Users can discover, manipulate, generate results from enormous ground station and library stores. Anyone with a browser and network connectivity can share the underlying technology and information and see the latest goings on around the world. I'll stop rambling for now. Suffice it to say I have a new mission in life. I intend to go public and viral- and inside to my lifelong government contacts to see if I can move this along. At this point, you may be wondering, "Just how stable is this guy?" Let me assure you, I am very stable, focused, and energized towards the future. You are all my friends and we are bonded together with a common belief in the evolution of world class open source software for geospatial processing. To quote Arnold - "I'll be back" bet you were thinking about the other Arnold… Sincerely, Mark
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