OpenGeo
From Wiki.GIS.com
 | |
| Type | 501(c)(3) |
|---|---|
| Founded | New York, New York (2001) |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, U.S. |
| Key people | Chris Holmes, Founder/President |
| Industry | Software Geographic Information Systems (GIS) |
| Products | GeoServer, PostGIS, GeoWebCache, GeoExt, OpenLayers, GeoTools |
| Website | opengeo.org |
OpenGeo is a social enterprise working to build web-based geospatial technology that brings the best practices of open source software to geospatial organizations around the world. OpenGeo supports open source communities by employing key developers of PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers and GeoExt.[1]
OpenGeo is the geospatial division of The Open Planning Project (TOPP), a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that functions as a high tech social incubator.[2] All revenue has been and will continue to be re-invested into innovative and useful software in support of TOPP’s mission.
Contents |
[edit] History
The GeoServer project began in 2001, under the umbrella of The Open Planning Project, as a tool for community planning. However, as GeoServer matured it became clear that there was a larger role for open source software to play in making government and other data more accessible.[3]
Each year, more people were using GeoServer, and the number of customers coming in with paid work for GeoServer development increased. The Open Planning Project invested in the software while also taking paid contracts to improve or modify it in directions that clients want. In the beginning, TOPP’s investment was always on a small scale basis, with no more than two or three people working on GeoServer full-time.
Since 2007, the team has grown from three people to seventeen, and in the first half of the year came close to full cost recovery. OpenGeo expanded their GeoServer team, started to invest heavily in the OpenLayers web map, and added team members to integrate the GeoWebCache accelerator and the PostGIS spatial database.
[edit] Philosophy
OpenGeo is a new type of organization, a “dot org” that draws on the best of the for-profit and non-profit worlds with the goal of making geospatial information more open: publicly available, accessible on compelling platforms that people want to use.[4]
To achieve this goal, OpenGeo builds open source geospatial tools that make it easy for any organization to get their geospatial information on the web in open formats, and interoperable services.
Although OpenGeo is a nonprofit, it competes in the market for contracts like a traditional company but re-invests profit in mission-driven software projects. While some social enterprises choose a business model that maximizes revenue in a traditional way and then give the profits to good causes, OpenGeo seeks to align its incentives by favoring revenue models that bring in money only when they also further the mission in some way. This allows them to focus on a goal that all clients care about: producing truly great software.
[edit] References
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