[UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] ADSK and the MapServer Foundation - tying the threads together

[Gary Lang]

Folks,   I want to answer questions and continue to try to learn what the concerns are. I thought I’d sit down and write a longer mail about the discussions I see taking place around all this. The responses seem to range from thoughtful to paranoid. So clearly the inability to speak freely has not been our friend. I have triedi to explain why we needed to be quiet about it, and hopefully that adds to the understanding.   It is good to be able to speak freely about all this, at last. I have been very uncomfortable with only being able to speak to a limited set of stakeholders, but unable to see a way around the legal issues our legal team put in front of us before undertaking all this. Let me give some background on how we got here. About two years ago I kicked off a project to rewrite MapGuide so that it would be a first-class citizen on Linux. The current MapGuide is Windows-centric to the core.  To me, trying to do web-mapping in 2003 that didn’t support Linux was a non-starter. The team agreed and off we went.   We started off using ACE and BDB as foundation technologies, used SWIG for generating our API infrastructure, and switched to SQLite for the geodatabase, and created the FDO framework for accessing multiple data types through a modular architecture that is sort of like JDO but with a geospatial slant (hence “Feature Data Object”). At the start of the project, on instinct, I asked the engineers to please make their code as readable and as easy to change as possible, as if someone from outside the company would read it some day.   We really valued the open source components we were using and started to wonder how to give something back to the open source world. About a year ago, we visited a friend of mine who was the CEO at Ximian, which had been recently acquired by Novell. We spent a lot of time with Nat and Miguel who encouraged us to think hard about open source. We were thinking about some minor products. They encouraged us to think about Tux after hearing about it. We listened carefully and took lots of notes.   A little less than a year ago, I began to believe that, as we were selling more applications the web server components, maybe our users would be better served by an open source process for the Map server tier. It turned out that DMSolutions and some of our people in Ottawa worked at the same company a few years ago, and we got together through one of these mutual ex-Tydav people. I decided to disclose them on our idea to see if it made any sense, and initially to try to convince them to maybe switch. Imagine the headlines – “Autodesk Goes Open Source! DMSolutions Ditches MapServer for MapGuide!.” This was a dumb idea, and a non-starter for DMS. Instead of convincing them to switch, they convinced us to work with the MapServer community in a way that was non-competitive. To explore this further, we asked some of the recommended folks to sign an NDA so that we could tell them about Tux and about our crazy idea to be the first vendor in this space to go open source with their product, and a new one at that. To answer one of your questions: there is no perceived benefit to this being a secret. In fact, it's not good from any perspective including ours. There simply was no other way for us to explore this idea with the MapServer community at large. Let me explain. In Ed’s email, he referenced the following comment: "And you replied, "You do it in an open, inclusive way that opens the discussion to all stakeholders, not just a self-selected few.  You don't ask us to sign non-disclosure agreements and deliberately exclude the majority of the community." I would ask folks to please go back and read Dave's email with respect to Autodesk being a public company. Unfortunately, we do not have the freedom to speculate in public or hand out our source code without some sort of framework like the foundation or an NDA. So we had two choices: 1)     We could have gone it alone and been public about that from day one. However, that gave us no options for stakeholder consultation and meant we would have to try to bridge the gap with MapServer after effectively attacking it. 2)     Or, from day one, we could ask those who represent the widest number of MapServer stakeholders - i.e. the steering committee - if we could have a preliminary conversation about what to do. Those were really our only two choices. The bottom line is that a public company can't speculate on a mailing list about what it should or should not do. If we disagree on this point, let’s send our lawyers off to argue about it, but I am not in a position to disagree with ours in any event. Now that the cat's out of the bag, I can say that we are much happier approaching open source this way rather than doing it ourselves. We hope others will feel the same once they understand the two options we had. Maybe we could have been more creative and found a third way. As a model for future participants or even to help me in any future open source work I'll do (and I'll do more in my career, I am certain), any suggestions would be appreciated. Some things you will see as the weeks progress with respect to Autodesk's involvement: a) We will participate in establishing the foundation, which, contrary to what has been said here, is already a legal entity. However, we will not drive the foundation. It would undermine our goals to do this. b) We will give our code - about 60 man-years of sweat and blood by people who love their work--to the foundation. This is a non-trivial thing. Do the math on the cost and think about projects you’ve worked on that take 2 years of hard work. We are contributing something too. c) we will be a minority vote in any foundation configuration. I am limiting Autodesk's participation to two people - myself and one other person - both engineers. I expect the MapServer membership to be some multiple of that. As it is, the current discussion and decision process observes the ratio you see on the open letter signature list - 1 to 10, Autodesk to MapServer. We will never have control of the MapServer Foundation’s board. d) we will contribute code to MapServer as well as continue to work on the code we are contributing which I'll refer to as MSE for short. We will give away our FDO framework for ArcSDE, SHP, ODBC, MySQL, etc. We will make this work with MapServer. Finally, I hope people can continue to be respectful of the signers of the open letter. They are nobody's fools and nobody's tools and will simply use this opportunity to strengthen their efforts. That's more than fine with us. Also keep in mind that as Tyler said, every press release and FAQ we've produced was reviewed by that group of people. If someone (who is "Seba"?) decided to forward an Autodesk press release from Yahoo to /. instead of the open letter, we have no more control over that any more than we control the MapServer community or the steering committee. MapServer should continue to grow and, believe me, it's in our interest to see it grow. We obviously hope people will look at the code we're contributing as well, but we're just happy to be in the open now.   Now that we're past the initial step of disclosure, the discussion should be as wide open as possible. We are all actively talking to other entities about sponsoring the MapServer Foundation. Just as we don't want Autodesk to be the driver of the community we would like to see more involvement by other players in the GIS world. I hope this answers some questions and generates more. I look forward to your feedback.   Gary Lang [EMAIL PROTECTED]