An Open Letter to the MapServer Open Source Web Mapping Community
November 28, 2005
Greetings MapServer community,
We are pleased to share with you some exciting news about the future of open
source web mapping.
Over the past few years MapServer adoption has grown ten-fold and has become
the web mapping platform of choice for many businesses, government agencies,
nonprofit groups and individuals. The MapServer developers have added powerful
new features. The community has enjoyed three incredible conferences and
continues to support each other and enhance the community.
We want to ensure that this success and momentum continues for the MapServer
product and community. MapServer continues to run well in diverse environments
and its rich set of features play an indispensable role in many organizations.
More than ever, we are committed to improving MapServer and providing
exceptional value to the community.
To this end, we take this opportunity to share two bits of news: the creation
of the MapServer Foundation and welcoming the addition of Autodesk's
next-generation web mapping platform (previously known as Tux) as open source
into the foundation.
MapServer Foundation
We are delighted to announce the creation of the MapServer Foundation
(mapserverfoundation.org). The foundation is a nonprofit organization whose
goal is to provide a supportive framework for open, collaborative development
of geospatial software. Several groups and individuals are collaborating to
help launch and sponsor the new foundation. Financial support from Autodesk
will allow us to get the foundation up and running. In this letter, we present
some ideas of how we think the foundation can help the community, but these
ideas need broader discussion and debate within the community.
We looked to other successful open source movements, such as Apache, to see how
our community could benefit from the creation of an independent foundation. It
is clear that the time has come to create a formal infrastructure to help
further support and promote the professional open source web mapping
development environments and communities. While initially focused on web
mapping projects, we hope the foundation will adopt other open source
geospatial projects that need a home.
Forming the foundation is only the beginning, as we now seek community
involvement and participation. The foundation will have a governance model that
allows it to be run by a Board of Directors that represents the community. How
it is ultimately going to be run is up to the members of the community. The
foundation will also have a set of bylaws that provide structure and can be
amended through a community voting process.
Role of the foundation
The first priority for the foundation is to engage the broader MapServer
community. Members of the community are encouraged to join and get involved.
Consider this letter as your invitation to participate. The community web site
is the place where you, as a user and participant in the community, can follow
and contribute to the development of the MapServer Foundation family of
projects.
The primary responsibilities of the foundation may include:
* Support code repository and other project infrastructure
* Formalized process for decision-making (e.g. where to host the next
conference)
* Legal protection for the source code and developers of the software
* Paying for development work on minor improvements of the platform
* Acting as a central repository for marketing, branding and professional
image development of the product
* Providing process for mitigating disputes
* Financial support for advocacy, sponsorship, community events and
conferences
Many of these community-related functions have been overseen in an ad-hoc
manner or deferred to the University of Minnesota or other organizations in the
past. The foundation will streamline the coordination of legal, administrative
and governance efforts.
As MapServer will now be officially managed by the foundation, it no longer
makes sense to call it UMN MapServer. Product branding is also becoming more
important and this is a good opportunity to introduce a more visual name for
the product. We propose calling it MapServer Cheetah. This presents a fast and
agile image that suits the product well and will help differentiate it from
other MapServer products.
MapServer Cheetah & MapServer Enterprise
We are also very excited about Autodesk's decision to release their next
generation web mapping platform into the open source community through the
MapServer Foundation. This adds further legitimacy to our open source
development platform. Their product will be named MapServer Enterprise and is
the successor to Autodesk MapGuide but built on an entirely new architecture.
MapServer Enterprise and MapServer Cheetah will be run as two separate but
parallel projects. There are no plans to merge them into one but we aim to
share technologies between the two projects wherever possible. We also hope to
provide utilities that allow the community to easily use one or both platforms.
MapServer Enterprise will be licensed using the OSI-approved GNU Lesser General
Public License (LGPL). MapServer Cheetah will continue to be licensed under an
MIT-style open source license. Autodesk is eager to participate in an open and
transparent development process driven by independent guidance from the
community. We encourage you to check out MapServer Enterprise, which is
available today on the community web site.
We are proud to be part of this community and we hope you will join us in
establishing the MapServer Foundation. For more information on how to get
involved, please visit the community site at: mapserverfoundation.org and join
the mailing list discussions.
Sincerely,
Steve Lime, Chair, MapServer Technical Steering Committee (MTSC)
Yewondwossen Assefa, MTSC Member
Howard Butler, MTSC Member
Daniel Morissette, MTSC Member
Perry Nacionales, MTSC Member
Frank Warmerdam, MTSC Member
Tom Burk, University of Minnesota
David McIlhagga, DM Solutions Group
Tyler Mitchell
Claude Philipona, Camptocamp SA and FOSS4G 2006 organizing committee
Gary Lang, Autodesk
