Who writes history?

Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 1:27 am Posted in MapGuide, Rant

About a year and a half ago, Autodesk entered into the open source geospatial community with an announcement that caused a storm of controversy and recrimination in the MapServer community. I thought that this had all been worked out, but Karel Cech just posted a semi-informed rant on the subject and brought it up again.

Here’s my measured response:

MapServer Enterprise is not another name for MapGuide Open Source. The brand is plain-and-simple MapGuide, and shouldn’t be referred to as anything else. Autodesk’s packaged commercial version is called MapGuide Enterprise. Perhaps this is what the ADSK representative was referring to?

To add a little clarification to Karel’s history… Back in 2005, the MapServer technical steering committee worked with Autodesk in an attempt to make Autodesk’s entry into open source geospatial a productive experience for both MapServer and for what would become MapGuide. Working in secrecy and failing to include the larger MapServer community in this effort had some nasty repercussions at the time (brand confusion, community turmoil, etc). However, Autodesk’s Gary Lang acted graciously throughout, and within a week had backed away from using the MapServer name. This, despite the weeks of effort it took the development team to re-brand, re-package, and re-test the code base, and despite the time and money that had already been spent marketing the new brand.

Since then, Autodesk has proven its commitment to open development processes. The MapGuide developers at Autodesk use Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software as a bible and conscientiously work with our user community to guide the future of MapGuide in as open a way as possible. They have also proven their commitment to the larger open source geospatial community through the ongoing funding and support of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. OSGeo acts as an umbrella organisation for MapGuide, MapServer, and many other leading-edge open source geospatial applications.

As Karel says, it’s great that there are several alternative geospatial server platforms available in the open source domain. I would certainly encourage anyone who requires a web mapping platform to properly evaluate MapGuide, MapServer, GeoServer and other open source geospatial platforms to determine which meets their needs. Choose the best tool for the job; choice is a huge part of the open source value proposition. But whatever you do, don’t dismiss any one of them based on a single inaccurate blog post.

Disclosure: I am a MapGuide Open Source Project Steering Committee member (though not speaking for the PSC here) and am NOT an Autodesk employee.

- J

P.S. MapGuide does offer a JSP Web API alongside its functionally equivalent PHP and ASP.Net interfaces. However, contrary to Karel’s claims, MapGuide is not built on Java. MapGuide is entirely coded in cross-platform C++, using SWIG to generate the user-facing web APIs. It leverages many of the same open source C-based libraries used by MapServer and other applications, such as Proj.4, GEOS and, indirectly, GDAL and OGR.

Related posts

  • No related posts.

5 Responses to “Who writes history?”

Track Responses to This Entry With the RSS Feed

  1. 1Karel Cech on Jun 26, 2007 at 3:25 am:

    Jason, thanks for the clarification on history and the technical. I didnt watch it much back in 2005. I wouldn’t certainly take out this issue again if I wouldn’t hear it from “some” people from Autodesk in GlobalGeo expo in Barcelona (I admit “some” is not very determinant).
    Best regards, Karel

  2. 2Jason Birch on Jun 26, 2007 at 10:59 am:

    Thanks Karel.

    I’m sure that there are Autodesk folks trying to track down this miscommunication problem as we speak :)

  3. 3Sean Gillies on Jun 30, 2007 at 1:28 am:

    Jason, by failing to mention that the MapServer developers who would not sign a NDA with Autodesk were cut out of the project’s inner circle, you are subtly revising history. Other projects can learn from MapServer’s mistakes, but only if we stop covering them up.

  4. 4Jason Birch on Jun 30, 2007 at 3:27 am:

    Sean, I wasn’t part of the MapServer community when all of that went down, just watching from the sidelines. I didn’t know that that had happenned (didn’t see it in the any of the messages or blog posts that I read) and certainly wasn’t intending to cover anything up. Care to provide more detail?

  5. 5Ritesh Ambastha on Sep 25, 2007 at 2:55 am:

    Thanks Jason !
    I was evaluating many open source GIS solutions existing in todays world. Your blog helped me to know the roots of few past developments. I would love to hear about DM solutions and some developments at Mapserver side too.