As next week’s Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference approaches, it’s fitting to reflect on the history of open source software in the GIS community and to comment on its active community of developers and practitioners.
One of the earliest GIS systems was an open source project that was spearheaded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at their Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL). The software called GRASS stands for Geographic Resources Analysis Support System. It was built on UNIX and tied into the Internet for development. It was used in the university research setting around the world with a global team of developers, and it continues on today.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needed to push GRASS development into the public sector, the move created the Open GRASS Foundation. David Schell was a notable member of this organization, and this foundation later evolved into the creation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). In a sense, open source helped create the OGC and the standards work of OGC has stimulated the open source community.
The creation of open standards, OGC specifications and the openness of the Web has provided fertile ground for the open source community. The flexibility of open standards provides a framework for the creation of interchangeable toolsets and components that can be re-purposed to create many different custom solutions.
There have been a number of very successful open source programs in addition to GRASS. The MapServer, developed initially by the University of Minnesota, has seen considerable uptake, and helped spur Autodesk to push their own proprietary MapGuide software into the open source community.
Autodesk’s move to open source has provided a great deal of momentum for open source. Not only have they relinquished their code, but they were instrumental in setting up the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. This foundation provides a central gathering point for developers of numerous applications and provides a unified and public face for this innovative group of developers.
With broad support from multiple levels of government and academia, it’s obvious that open source software will continue to make inroads.
