[OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Why? Mapbuilder is a stable, feature rich, standards compliant, fast, webmapping framework with a strong developer community. Why has it come to the end of its life? The browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other webmapping clients have increased in functionality and attractiveness to users. In particular, Openlayers is simpler to use, has attracted an increabibly strong developer community, has good quality control and development processes, and has developed most of the webmapping functionality previously only offered by Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is attacting the majority of the users and developers that previously would have used Mapbuilder. One day someone will write a compelling paper on the history of the two similar projects and analyse the key differences and decision points which led to one project out shining the other. But we are not crying Well, maybe we feel a twing of loss for the Mapbuilder project we started years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of Mapbuilder as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping community to consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping tools in particular, around Openlayers. There has been significant collaboration between the Mapbuilder and Openlayers communities over the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has incorporated Openlayers as its rendering engine and fetures have been shared between projects. In many cases, developers from both projects worked together on the same codebase (in Openlayers), then ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a deliberate move toward the merging of the two developer communities and most of the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee have contributed to the Openlayers codebase. So in essence, by changing our allegience from Mapbuilder to Openlayers we take with us some of our code, we replace some features with equivalent Openlayers features, we take our community with us, and we gain an existing, robust and welcoming community. What should Mapbuilder users do? Users have a few options. You already own the source code, so you are welcome to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder code for as long as you like. At some point, users will likely want to upgrade, and at that point we suggest considering Openlayers for your application. It now provides the majority of the fuctionality that was previously only offered by Mapbuilder. What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo? Having a graduated OSGeo project retire might be seen as an embarassment for OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It shows two projects growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and evenually merging into a stronger, more focused community. However, it does raise a dilemma with regards to what should be done with a retired project. Some of the key OSGeo criteria, like Community Backing and Best of Breed Software will gradually be lost, so we should not continue to promote Mapbuilder. Still, we wouldn't want to erase Mapbuilder's history with OSGeo as our community has documented valuable lessons learned during the graduation process. I suggest a new retired category be created which keeps track of retired projects. Thanks We, the project steering committee, have derived a huge amount of pleasure building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder Community. For many of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into a fullfilling Open Source and/or Geospatial career. We'd like to thank all the users, developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have met along the way. The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance): Cameron Shorter Mike Adair Patrice Cappelaere Steven M. Ottens Matt Diez Olivier Terral Andreas Hocevar Gertjan van Oosten Linda Derezinski -- Cameron Shorter Geospatial Systems Architect Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050 Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254 Think Globally, Fix Locally Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Hello Cameron! Excellent decision! It takes a lot of courage to admit that the value of a project is decreased because of the competition. Despite the fact that some components of mapbuilder are really great! I hope the knowledge of the people who worked on mapbuilder will find its way into the OSGeo projects and that those people will find equal pleasure in helping the other projects grow and mature! Sincerely, Milo van der Linden Cameron Shorter wrote: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder http://communitymapbuilder.org/ project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Why? Mapbuilder is a stable, feature rich, standards compliant, fast, webmapping framework with a strong developer community. Why has it come to the end of its life? The browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other webmapping clients have increased in functionality and attractiveness to users. In particular, Openlayers is simpler to use, has attracted an increabibly strong developer community, has good quality control and development processes, and has developed most of the webmapping functionality previously only offered by Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is attacting the majority of the users and developers that previously would have used Mapbuilder. One day someone will write a compelling paper on the history of the two similar projects and analyse the key differences and decision points which led to one project out shining the other. But we are not crying Well, maybe we feel a twing of loss for the Mapbuilder project we started years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of Mapbuilder as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping community to consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping tools – in particular, around Openlayers. There has been significant collaboration between the Mapbuilder and Openlayers communities over the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has incorporated Openlayers as its rendering engine and fetures have been shared between projects. In many cases, developers from both projects worked together on the same codebase (in Openlayers), then ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a deliberate move toward the merging of the two developer communities and most of the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee have contributed to the Openlayers codebase. So in essence, by changing our allegience from Mapbuilder to Openlayers we take with us some of our code, we replace some features with equivalent Openlayers features, we take our community with us, and we gain an existing, robust and welcoming community. What should Mapbuilder users do? Users have a few options. You already own the source code, so you are welcome to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder code for as long as you like. At some point, users will likely want to upgrade, and at that point we suggest considering Openlayers for your application. It now provides the majority of the fuctionality that was previously only offered by Mapbuilder. What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo? Having a graduated OSGeo project retire might be seen as an embarassment for OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It shows two projects growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and evenually merging into a stronger, more focused community. However, it does raise a dilemma with regards to what should be done with a retired project. Some of the key OSGeo criteria, like “Community Backing” and “Best of Breed Software” will gradually be lost, so we should not continue to promote Mapbuilder. Still, we wouldn't want to erase Mapbuilder's history with OSGeo as our community has documented valuable lessons learned during the graduation process. I suggest a new “retired” category be created which keeps track of retired projects. Thanks We, the project steering committee, have derived a huge amount of pleasure building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder Community. For many of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into a fullfilling Open Source and/or Geospatial career. We'd like to thank all the users, developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have met along the way. The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance): * Cameron Shorter * Mike Adair * Patrice Cappelaere * Steven M. Ottens * Matt Diez *
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Cameron - this is indeed an extremely interesting message. I need to thank you (and your team) for drafting a communication that may be of interest for many. Just a sidebar note, below, as the concept of a retired application made me smile...(see below) 2008/7/28 Cameron Shorter [EMAIL PROTECTED]: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder project to gracefully retire. .. I suggest a new retired category be created which keeps track of retired projects. to expand on these lines... ...If the retired project belongs more to US, may I recommend it spends some time on a server located in the Florida Keys. ...If it belongs more to Europe, maybe Provence or Tuscany or other similar spots may be a good place for retired Mapbuilder to sit... ...If it feels like an Asian project, or from other regions of the world, I would like to know where Asians, Africans etc - would like to see it end its days. no puns intended - I think we are going to investigate more and more on the full life cycle of geospatial software (as more of these dynamics should be expected in the future), and I will keep your initial posting on Mapbuilder as a reference in this respect. Regards Andrea Giacomelli, aka pibinko vicepresident and media relations manager - GFOSS.it - Italian OSGeo Chapter ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Cameron Shorter wrote: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder http://communitymapbuilder.org/ project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Cameron, I think this is an excellent and professional approach - given a clear heads up to the community on the status of things. In fact, I've been just thrilled by the degree of cooperation achieved between several of the web mapping client side projects in recent years. The experience and efforts focused on improvement and exploitation of OpenLayers by those involved in Mapbuilder, ka-map and other projects has helped turn OpenLayers into what I would argue is the best of breed role it plays now. As far as OSGeo process, I agree that we (perhaps within the incubation committee?) need to work out an end-of-life/retired status for projects. There is no problem continuing to host project resources of course, but at some point we would want to release the project from live status reporting and governance requirements and to remove it from the front page so not too many new users are guided to it as a promoted project. If there is no objection, I'll distribute the eol announcement via the OSGeo announce mechanism. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Hi Cameron and others, Congratulations indeed for the decision and way forward! Looking at what for instance the Apache Jakarta Project does, adding a Retired projects page seems a good solution. Elegant and clear. See http://jakarta.apache.org/site/retired-projects.html I have no problem with seeing such a link in the current projects listing on the OSGeo homepage. Ciao, Jeroen On Jul 28, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote: Cameron Shorter wrote: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder http://communitymapbuilder.org/ project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Cameron, I think this is an excellent and professional approach - given a clear heads up to the community on the status of things. In fact, I've been just thrilled by the degree of cooperation achieved between several of the web mapping client side projects in recent years. The experience and efforts focused on improvement and exploitation of OpenLayers by those involved in Mapbuilder, ka-map and other projects has helped turn OpenLayers into what I would argue is the best of breed role it plays now. As far as OSGeo process, I agree that we (perhaps within the incubation committee?) need to work out an end-of-life/retired status for projects. There is no problem continuing to host project resources of course, but at some point we would want to release the project from live status reporting and governance requirements and to remove it from the front page so not too many new users are guided to it as a promoted project. If there is no objection, I'll distribute the eol announcement via the OSGeo announce mechanism. Best regards, -- --- +-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
I remember Mike Adair's demo of MapBuilder to me, long ago at an OGC meeting, and how impressed I was. The kinds of things they were doing were ground-breaking. I think the entire Geo FOSS community has been strengthened by the accomplishments of this project. I can understand the bittersweet nature of an announcement like this. I tip my hat to the entire MapBuilder steering committee for their obviously deep commitment to the OSGeo cause. This is truly an example of thinking globally! Allan On Jul 28, 2008, at 7:02 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Why? Mapbuilder is a stable, feature rich, standards compliant, fast, webmapping framework with a strong developer community. Why has it come to the end of its life? The browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other webmapping clients have increased in functionality and attractiveness to users. In particular, Openlayers is simpler to use, has attracted an increabibly strong developer community, has good quality control and development processes, and has developed most of the webmapping functionality previously only offered by Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is attacting the majority of the users and developers that previously would have used Mapbuilder. One day someone will write a compelling paper on the history of the two similar projects and analyse the key differences and decision points which led to one project out shining the other. But we are not crying Well, maybe we feel a twing of loss for the Mapbuilder project we started years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of Mapbuilder as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping community to consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping tools – in particular, around Openlayers. There has been significant collaboration between the Mapbuilder and Openlayers communities over the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has incorporated Openlayers as its rendering engine and fetures have been shared between projects. In many cases, developers from both projects worked together on the same codebase (in Openlayers), then ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a deliberate move toward the merging of the two developer communities and most of the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee have contributed to the Openlayers codebase. So in essence, by changing our allegience from Mapbuilder to Openlayers we take with us some of our code, we replace some features with equivalent Openlayers features, we take our community with us, and we gain an existing, robust and welcoming community. What should Mapbuilder users do? Users have a few options. You already own the source code, so you are welcome to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder code for as long as you like. At some point, users will likely want to upgrade, and at that point we suggest considering Openlayers for your application. It now provides the majority of the fuctionality that was previously only offered by Mapbuilder. What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo? Having a graduated OSGeo project retire might be seen as an embarassment for OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It shows two projects growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and evenually merging into a stronger, more focused community. However, it does raise a dilemma with regards to what should be done with a retired project. Some of the key OSGeo criteria, like “Community Backing” and “Best of Breed Software” will gradually be lost, so we should not continue to promote Mapbuilder. Still, we wouldn't want to erase Mapbuilder's history with OSGeo as our community has documented valuable lessons learned during the graduation process. I suggest a new “retired” category be created which keeps track of retired projects. Thanks We, the project steering committee, have derived a huge amount of pleasure building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder Community. For many of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into a fullfilling Open Source and/or Geospatial career. We'd like to thank all the users, developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have met along the way. The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance): Cameron Shorter Mike Adair Patrice Cappelaere Steven M. Ottens Matt Diez Olivier Terral Andreas Hocevar Gertjan van Oosten Linda Derezinski -- Cameron Shorter Geospatial Systems
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Mike's mention of the key role of a BoF in cooperation among projects is as good a reason as any to mention that you can plan your BoF session for 2008 here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G2008_BOF_Sessions. Who knows where it will lead? Gavin FOSS4G2008 conference chair -- Frank Warmerdam wrote: In fact, I've been just thrilled by the degree of cooperation achieved between several of the web mapping client side projects in recent years. The experience and efforts focused on improvement and exploitation of OpenLayers by those involved in Mapbuilder, ka-map and other projects has helped turn OpenLayers into what I would argue is the best of breed role it plays now. I just want to point out that a key event in this process was the web mapping client BoF at Lausanne where all of the FOSS client projects got together and decided to stop re-inventing the wheel. For me, this is a tangible demonstration of the benefits that OSGeo can achieve. Mike ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss winmail.dat___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder
Thanks to everyone for their kind words. In specific answer to some of Frank's questions: * Yes, feel free to forward on this announcement through whatever channels you wish. * Yes, we should: 1. Through the incubation committee set up a process for retiring projects. 2. Hide mapbuilder references from all the key public facing web pages. Frank Warmerdam wrote: Cameron Shorter wrote: End of life for Community Mapbuilder We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder http://communitymapbuilder.org/ project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history. Cameron, I think this is an excellent and professional approach - given a clear heads up to the community on the status of things. In fact, I've been just thrilled by the degree of cooperation achieved between several of the web mapping client side projects in recent years. The experience and efforts focused on improvement and exploitation of OpenLayers by those involved in Mapbuilder, ka-map and other projects has helped turn OpenLayers into what I would argue is the best of breed role it plays now. As far as OSGeo process, I agree that we (perhaps within the incubation committee?) need to work out an end-of-life/retired status for projects. There is no problem continuing to host project resources of course, but at some point we would want to release the project from live status reporting and governance requirements and to remove it from the front page so not too many new users are guided to it as a promoted project. If there is no objection, I'll distribute the eol announcement via the OSGeo announce mechanism. Best regards, -- Cameron Shorter Geospatial Systems Architect Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050 Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254 Think Globally, Fix Locally Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
