The emergence of open source Geospatial Software
2005/2006 is a watershed for the geospatial sector because of the widespread recognition that geospatial has joined the IT mainstream. Symptomatic of this phenomenon is the maturing of the open source geospatial community to a point that is reminiscent of the early days of the internet, when major IT vendors like IBM decided that it made more business sense to support the Apache Foundation's web server instead of developing their own. Last year a number of people active in the open source geospatial community, recognising that OSGEO software had matured, decided that the community needed to make some major organisational decisions to move to the next stage in the development of open source geospatial software. This discussion culminated in the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (http://www.osgeo.org/) in February of this year. This was driven not only by the realization that open source technology had matured and was widely used around the world, but more importantly that companies around the world have developed profitable businesses based on open source geospatial technology. In this presentation we will discuss the implications of the emergence of commercial open source geospatial software for open geospatial standards and for the future of the enterprise geospatial IT market.