If you were to look under the hood of GeoExpress 7 – and the rest of our products – you’d find that LizardTech, like a lot of other companies in our industry, relies on open source software. In our case, we’re experts in compression and wavelets and geospatial imaging, and so we spend a lot of our R&D dollars in those areas. But for the stuff we’re not experts in – like reading the GeoTIFF format, parsing XML, and handling projection systems – we find better value relying on open source solutions.

As someone once said, though, “the gift economy ain’t free”: there’s a moral imperative to give something back.

Since Michael P. Gerlek has already blogged about the second birthday of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), I thought I’d mention that in addition to his day job running part of our engineering team, Michael helps support the open source community by serving as editor for the monthly “Open Sources” column in GeoConnexion magazine.

Under the auspices of OSGeo, he has worked with many of the leaders of the open source geo world to shepherd nine 1000-word articles into print so far, with several more queued up for future issues.

The following links open PDFs.

#1 – Welcome to Open Sources by Michael P. Gerlek

#2 – The OSSIM Project by Mark Lucas

#3 – BigTIFF by Frank Warmerdam

#4 – A Virtuous Circle of Collaboration by Chris Holmes

#5 – The Gift Economy Ain’t Free by Howard Butler and Chris Schmidt

#6 – Open Layers and TileCache by Schuyler Erle

#7 – MapBender by Arnulf Christl

#8 – GRASS by Malte Halbey-Martin (to appear in the March issue)

#9 – MapServer by Steve Lime (to appear in the April issue)

LizardTech is happy to be able to be a sponsor of OSGeo and support its staff on projects like this.

To celebrate the release of GeoExpress 7 – the strongest and best received version ever of our flagship product – the Engineering team took a snow day.

A few weeks ago, we had been all set to execute our original plan – an overnight at Scottish Lakes in the North Cascades – but the passes had closed the morning of the Big Day.

Disappointed (and better educated about avalanches) but not deterred, we decided to reschedule. It was difficult to find two days and a night that would work for all eleven of us the first time, and for our second “assault”, we had to settle for a day trip and even then, only nine of us made it into the caravan.

So last Friday we set out with two GPS units, three cars and enough walkie-talkies that each of us got at LEAST one.

At Snoqualmie Summit we split up for skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. Look at us (see photo above), all full of energy and confidence, unsuspecting of the horrors that lay ahead.

Actually, it was sunny and warm the whole day. The torrential downpour that soaked Seattle for most of the day only arrived after we had loaded up and were heading down the hill for a sumptuous repast at Thai Ginger in Factoria.

A good time was had by all and there were no injuries – which was good, because “return with no broken limbs” was called out in the spec for this project.

Top photo courtesy of Jeffrey Salazar.