OpenGeo

What gets us up in the morning and into the office? Is it building an open source geospatial software empire, and eventually rolling around in a room full of money? No, that’s not the point.

Making money is a second-order concern for our organization that enables our first-order concern: putting useful tools in the hands of governments and NGOs. The revenue from professional services and support enables the continued development of the open source software, which we want to see as widely used as possible.

So, when we learn that the Amazonian Protection System is using PostGIS and Geoserver in their applications to manage and protect the rain forest, that makes us very happy.

And hearing how scientists and conservation groups have used Geoserver, PostGIS, and OpenLayers in building a decision support system for studying marine protected areas makes us sort of giddy.

And learning that the Great Lakes Commission is using Geoserver, PostGIS and OpenLayers in monitoring the environmental conditions of the Lakes make us quiver a little bit uncontrollably.

And then we have to sit down for a moment.

These are all folks who have used the tools that our team members build and maintain, to do good in the world. They don’t have to ask permission, and they don’t have to pay us, and the world is a little more understandable after they are finished than it was before. And that’s the point.