The Emergence of Open Source Geospatial Software and its Implications for IT

The geospatial industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation because of the widespread recognition that geospatial is no longer special and has joined the IT mainstream. One of the dimensions 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. Recently people active in the open source geospatial community decided that the community needed to make some major organizational decisions to move to the next stage in the development of open source geospatial software. This recognition culminated in the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (www.osgeo.org). This was driven not only by the realization that open source geospatial technology 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 review the progress of open source geospatial software and discuss the implications of open source geospatial software for the IT industry.