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.

LizardTech isn’t in a position to be able to do the 20% Google thing, but over the past couple years here I have been fortunate to be able to spend a little of my time “giving something back” to the GIS community.

Back in February of 2006, I had the chance to spent a cold and windy day at an airport hotel in Chicago in a meeting with a couple dozen luminaries from the open source and activist wings of the geospatial world. The open source ecosystem for our industry was getting more attention and traction, and people were starting to form some sort of organization which could serve as a clearinghouse for these development efforts, promote the use of open source in industry, champion the use of free and open products in education, and so on. By the end of that day, the domain name “osgeo.com” had been registered and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation was born.

As a for-profit company, LizardTech and others have lots of reasons to support the open source movement. Esteemed coauthor Matt Fleagle and I wrote an article about this very topic last year.

This past year, OSGeo has seen the birth of a number of chapters, based around communities of regional interest or common language. The Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source (CUGOS) formed here in Seattle last spring, meeting every month here at our offices in Seattle – it’s nice to have a chance to meet other open source geo folks face-to-face for a change, instead of just trading emails and IRC messages.

We Lizards were also very fortunate this year to meet the up with the OSGeo tribes at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria. I and four other LizardTech engineers went up north for the week, and we all came home with a much better appreciation of the broad set of libraries and applications we can build on, as well as the people who work on them.

Speaking just as an individual, it’s been a great privilege to get to know and work with the people from across the globe that make up OSGeo – smart and principled people all, but with a refreshingly diverse set of backgrounds, skills, and passions.

For many years, LizardTech has relied on open source software as one of our strategies for more effective development of robust software. I’m proud that we’re able to associate ourselves with OSGeo, and we look forward to another year of collaboration and growth with the Foundation.