In the corner photo you see what data exchange meant in those days. Landsat 5 was launched in 1984, GRASS 1.0 was released a year later.
Of huge importance for the Free Software development was the publication of the GNU manifesto by Richard Stallman (the “four freedoms” were defined).
In 1987 a GRASS video was produced with William Shatner, known as Captain Kirk of Star Trek, being the speaker.
And 5.25 inch floppies were becoming fashion in these days for tiny data sets!
And then finally an initial internet release of Open Source GIS software! Still there was almost nobody online in those days, at least not able to download 100 MB of source code...
The big spread of internet happened due to the acceptance of TCP/IP as protocol.
Information exchange happened via FTP.
Today all geeks are sharing code via SVN or git or other online code sharing repositories. But back in the 80th there was no online system like this.
Either manual management or at most RCS which is file based.
At the level of organizations many changes occurred: the GIS world became more professional and organized.
In 1992 the GRASS Interagency Coordinating Commitee was founded, it was turned into the Open GRASS Foundation which then became the OpenGIS Consortium.
The timeline shows the evolution.
While Tim Berners-Lee constituted the World Wide Web Consortium, the today's OGC was established.
This map shows the internet accessibility in the year 1998 – people being online in percent.
As you see, in those days internet was yet restricted to a few countries in terms of accessibility.
And, obviously:
without internet no distributed source code development nor easy geodata exchange.
Well, we happily survived the Year 2000 bug and reached the next decade...
Now Communities growing together!
This drawing has been done by the older daugther of Venka (Venkatesh Raghavan in Osaka) for the initial 2004 FOSS4G conference in Bangkok which I'll mention shortly
In just a few years a lot of new software projects were started, I don't have the time to illustrate them in details. You see that all adopted the collaborative tools for development.
From the demand to get coordination among these projects the idea arose to create an umbrella foundation, OSGeo
Precursor conference at Trento, 2002: International GRASS GIS conference
For the term “FOSS4G” we have to thank Venka once more. He proposed the conference title in 2004 for the conference at Chulalongkorn University.
Also Jim Westervelt came to give us an authentic lecture about the early days at this meeting.
Structure of OSGeo
The next slides will be much more familiar for you... code sprint photos
Here the mapbender team in 2007 and the QGIS hackfest in Pisa in 2010.
For those not familiar with it:
- it is a gathering of likeminded people
- no need to be a developer
- newcomers are there up to core developers
Instead of writing 10 emails to discuss an issue, we just discuss it directly, rarely long with some beer
And: The outcome of such a week is often impressive.
Next chance for you: Bonn in August 2016
OSGeo mailing list statistics
GSoC
Professional support
The increasing demand for geospatial data in the Web browser and increasing interactivity naturally requires the adoption of new emerging technologies.
An interesting new method of fundraining, instead of direct sponsoring by a few is after crowd knowledge (Wikipedia) and crowd mapping (OSM) now crowd funding where till a deadline a certain funding goal should be achieved.
Example: OpenLayers 3 funding, aiming at more than 300,000 USD – and they are almost there!
Since we like to think big, why to getting our tools on Supercomputers running...
Indeed, we are already there:
PROJ4, GDAL and GRASS GIS are available even on TOP500 systems.
The harder part was to get it compiled on Non-Linux Supercomputers :-)
For massive data processing currently job managers are supported. Work is underway for GPU based clusters which require a major source code restructuring.
There are also new possibilities for plotting maps: from 2D to 3D using rapid prototyping technologies which have been directly connected to Open Source GIS.
Here an example of the polar ice cap of Mars (so, no need to restrict yourself to mother Earth):
The processing chain was: from Radar remote sensing data to voxels to 3D plots
Please come to FOSS4G 2016 at Bonn, Germany
I will be there, working in my new company “mundialis” – www.mundialis.de
Happy birthday, OSGeo!
And
Thanks to all FOSS4G contributors all over the world.
Thank you for listening