October 18th, 2009
Our team is in the air, heading towards Sydney, Australian and FOSS4G 2009! OpenGeo will be presenting or co-presenting the following workshops on Tuesday:
And that’s just Tuesday!
On Thursday, Paul Ramsey will be giving a keynote presentation, titled “Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts: The Future of the Open Source Economy”.
You can also catch OpenGeo team members giving the following talks:
Finally the WMS Performance Shootout, in which Geoserver is participating, will be featured in the closing plenary session!
You can also catch up with us on the exhibition floor, where we will have booth staffed through-out the conference. On the Twitter, we will be tweeting events and meet-ups @opengeo and #foss4g. See you in Sydney soon!
June 17th, 2009
The developers at OpenGeo have been working with others toward an initial release of the GeoExt toolkit. GeoExt brings together the spatial capabilities of OpenLayers with the user interface power of ExtJS. To demonstrate the types of applications that can be built with GeoExt, we’re putting out a preview release of GeoExplorer.
The goal of GeoExplorer is to make it easy for anyone to assemble a browser based mapping application with functionality traditionally found in the desktop GIS world. The GeoExplorer preview release includes basic layer browsing capabilities and can be placed in front of any compliant WMS. Give the preview release a try or download it and set it up in front of your own server.
After the initial release of GeoExt, we’ll be rolling out a more feature filled version of GeoExplorer. Upcoming releases will include a wizard for configuring a GeoExplorer application with your own layers and publishing options for embedding the app in any web page.
June 3rd, 2009
While explaining the OpenGeo concept to folks at Where 2.0 last week, I found myself returning over and over again to a concept, “social capital”, describing what makes OpenGeo different from a company that hires a dozen random smart people and tells them to “go learn this open source GIS stuff”.
Because the source code is open, any smart person can go into the code, and learn lots about it, and become a competent user and developer. However, a random smart developer cannot quickly gain understanding of the history of the project or social capital in the project community.
Understanding the history of the project allows developers to avoid re-hashing old conversations and old decisions. It allows them to avoid leading their clients down dead-end paths, creating code that the community will not want to use. It provides them the background to know what procedures have to be followed in order to get new code into a project, and to start the wheels turning right away (rather than at the end of a development cycle).
Social capital allows developers to short circuit time-consuming tasks by leaning on the expertise of other community members. When our vector data experts help the Geoserver raster experts with problems, it creates a social obligation, so when we come back with a raster question, we are more likely to get a quick and accurate answer.
In short, OpenGeo has open source karma, and lots of it. We hire community members who already have karma when they join us, and we give them the time to help other community members and build more karma. And in the end that pool of karma makes us much more valuable to our clients than any random smart person off the street can be.
April 28th, 2009
Via All Points Blog, apparently the upcoming release of MapInfo will include native support for PostGIS. That means that MapInfo users can now easily plug directly into the OpenGeo Suite, reading and writing their data in PostGIS, and publishing it to the GeoWeb via the other components of the Suite.
March 3rd, 2009
Update: Now also in Directions Magazine.
Paul Ramsey has written an article for the Open Source Business Resource. Money quote:
Open source geospatial holds a number of lessons for other vertical markets. First, frontal assaults on the leading proprietary vendor are unlikely to succeed. In their core areas, the leading vendor has an advantage in technology development and existing mind-share. Usually, building enough technology to compete with a leading vendor head-to-head takes years of development, and a partially functional product will be ignored.
Second, disruptive changes in technology provide opportunities for open source. Most leading vendors carved out their advantage on the desktop during the 1980s and 1990s. The transition to web-based services has opened a temporary gap in the marketplace where existing vendors have a smaller technology advantage, and their marketing advantage is limited to their existing universe of customers. Open source can become the core for new service-based companies competing with proprietary software vendors.
Finally, new markets for capabilities are the most fertile opportunity of all. In geospatial, its expansion into daily life, through vehicle and device tracking, low cost aerial imaging, and handheld mapping, is growing the market exponentially. New developers and managers, without long-held preconceptions, are making technology choices. On a level playing field, open source Internet technologies are regularly winning.
February 17th, 2009
Decision makers find many aspects of open source software counter-intuitive, because they have gotten used to being the weaker member in relationships with powerful vendors. You don’t tell Oracle what features will be in Oracle 12p (the “p” is for “pfooey”), Oracle tells you. You don’t talk to the developers of Oracle, they are kept in a locked room in Redwood Shores. If you find a bug in Oracle that is in your application’s critical path, you wait until Oracle releases a patch, if they decide to.
Some of the power relationship problems are a function of enterprise size. The Department of Defense probably has no difficulty getting Oracle’s attention. But smaller customers might as well not even try. Critical bug? How critical, and please state that in terms of revenue implications to Oracle.
Open source projects break the logjam, because there is no monopoly on access to the code. That means that enterprises of all sizes – from large companies to independent developers – can provide service to users. So, no matter what your enterprise size is, you can find a service provider small enough that your problems are important to them.
For larger organizations, the problem is finding an open source service provider big enough to provide credible support for their chosen products. We are building OpenGeo into an organization with the scale to provide that support, for a range of open source geospatial tools.