Hello FreeGIS community... finally I returned to my office after staying in Minnesota OSG '05 and right after being at Linuxtag 2005 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

I enjoyed OSG '05 very much having met some people in real life for the first time. Unfortunatly I was not able to talk to all the guys I liked to talk with nor to attend all the interesting presentations, but here are at least some personal impressions:

Day 0:

At Stubs&Herbs some of us had a good time meeting the first time and having some discussion over a beer. For the first time I heard of the company Orkney which is located in Japan and boxes GRASS and MapServer in japanese. This all look really professional (despite the fact that I do not speak japanese ;-) and Toru Mori gave me some interesting insights into Free GIS Software market in Japan.

Day 1:

The PostGIS workshop held by Paul Ramsey was just great. Paul was always right to the point and I recommend to attend this workshop whenever you have a chance in the future.

I hope Paul will prepare an extended version of this workshop which IMHO would be very beneficial since PostGIS really rocks.

In the afternoon I attended the Chameleon workshop. Chameleon is a framework for building user interfaces for web mapping applications. This workshop was more directed towards developers and what I learned is that Chameleon is not yet easy to use but very powerful once you have managed to implement your first Chameleon widget (which we did during this workshop :-). The workshop was given by Paul Spencer.

What I learned from both workshops is that I am not used to be productive on Windows systems ;-) (Where is tab completion and why is copy&paste so complicated?)

At night we had a typical-US BBQ with lots of Beer again at Fort Snelling where we have been taught the gunners job. Paul (Chameleon) did this job well, but I still don't know which target he was aiming at :-)

Day 2:

The plenary session consisted of a number of lightning talks and the featured talk of Markus Neteler about GRASS.

Of the lightning talks the visually most impressive one was Norman Vine showing his osgPlanet. This is hot stuff and I hope it will be packaged for easy installation on GNU/Linux soon.

Sean Gillies explains his latest work and ideas on Python-impemented GIS stuff. I think he is right in that it is more important right now to bring GIS to the Zope community rathern than vice versa.

Schyler Erle dropped his topic on his new book "Mapping Hacks" in favor of a very enthusiastic call for action on a sort of distributed WMS caching with peer-to-peer elements to lower the load on the original WMS servers which partly got switched off due to too high load. (If I got it right).

Markus Netelers talk about GRASS seemed to impress most of the crowd. GRASS 6 has full vector support and the raster part is better than ever. I guess the downloads increased after that talk a lot ;-) However, GRASS 6 has been done by only a little, very engaged, core group. Imagine how GRASS would look like if some more developers could be attracted (yes, I mean _you_ :-).

The rest of the day I attended the business track which IMHO did not came to the depth I hoped. Notable was that Ionic representative explained that "using Free Software needs additional staff resources". He meant the additional work to discuss things with the other external developers and submit contributions. I do not agree with this statement as I think it is the other way around: how big would be the staff if a solution can not be based on a Free Software product but rather must be completely implemented anew?

The IMHO best presentation of this track was given by Dave McIlhagga about DM Solutions. He made clear that DM Solutions follows (increasingly strictly) a Free Software business model and proves to be very successfull with it.

Visiting the booth of Camp2Camp I learned that they are having nice success on the french-speaking market in france and switzerland. Last time I met Daniel Faivre (at Libre Software Meeting in Metz 2 years ago) they were only about 5 people, now they are upto 15.

Also, I talked to Allan Doyle about EOGEO. This is something that deserves support. I regretted to not have attended the EOGEO workshop at Day 1.

Day 3:

A 'must' for me was the presentation of Jo Walsh about openstreetmap.org. I think the way Jo and her team approaches the topic of gathering free vector roadmaps is most promising one I have seen in the past. Also it was an exceptional style of the presentation compared to the rest (it appeared to be inspired by Tufte's Visual Revelations :-).

The invited talk for closing session was given by Dirk-Willem van Gulik of Apache Software Foundation. He explained how ASF works and how they handle the software development focusing on quality assurance processes. In my opinion, and as Dirk also underlined, it is not reasonable to copy the whole ASF concept and apply it to UMN MapServer. But his talk already inspired to set up some improved processes for code quality as you can read recently on the MapServer developer mailing list.

Sol Katz Award:

When starting FreeGIS I used Sol's archive and it helped a lot. Unfortunately I never was in contact with him.

It was a great pleasure to see Frank Warmerdam receive this award for the work on many base GIS libraries we find in use in virtually any major Free GIS tool.

It followed podium discussions of which I choose the one on 'Making Free Software Our Business'. Again, here they did not get to the point and I disagreed with a number of statements.

As a side note, a representative of AutoDesk said that they will start supporting Free Software and its community. Whoever was in doubt of that was proven wrong later at Sally's where AutoDesk took over the beer bill for a table of Free Software developers :-) More seriously, I think AutoDesk (as other proprietary GIS companies) will slowly approach the phenonemon (in their sense) "Free Software". Maybe we see next year a first small (unimportant) library of AutoDesk release as Free Software as an experiment. I only hope that they do choose a standard license and to not tell their lawyers to yet write another one. Their experiment will likely be a failure if they do so.

Thanks again to Steve Lime and the whole organizing team for this event!

Jan-Oliver Wagner has been a founder of Intevation, a company with a Free Software business model. He is also the coordinator of the FreeGIS project and is active as a Project Evaluator and Reviewer for the framework programmes of the European Commission for the topics Free Software and GIS since 2002. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it See also Jan's website at: http://www.intevation.de/~jan/index.en.html

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• Jan-Oliver Wagner
• Intevation GmbH
• FreeGIS
• OSG '05 

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