FOSS4G – A Quick Review

-Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Many have already posted excellent coverage of FOSS4G (for example, Peter Batty). However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to add my perspective on the 2007 conference as a delinquent member of the local FOSS4G planning committee and a non-open source commercial software vendor.

Firstly, my sincere thanks to all my committee co-members for working so hard to host this event – namely Paul Ramsey, Brian Low, Jason Birch, Evert Kenk, Tyler Mitchell, Dave Patton, Jeff McKenna, and Frank Warmerdam. The committee, as well as Ian Holliday and Vanessa from Sea to Sky Meeting Management, are to be congratulated for an extremely well organized event. Our entire Safe team marveled that there were so many hands-on learning opportunities available at a conference of this size – and available right throughout the week. Special thanks to Dave for running this aspect of the conference so smoothly.

It was a pleasure to catch up with many people I had not met in years. I learned that there's a great deal of open source work being carried out in Hawaii; I can't wait to travel there to meet with some of my new friends from FOSS4G (as well as some long-term friends)! Interestingly, I also met Mark Phillips for the first time. Mark was a key contributor to the code that eventually became the TIGER reader within FME and OGR. Long ago Safe funded this work through Frank Warmerdam, who had in turn subcontracted it out. It’s always nice to close the loop and meet face-to-face with fellow collaborators, even if it’s years later.

Of course the announcement on the first morning of the conference of Autodesk's plans to move the CSMAP coordinate system conversion technology acquired from Mentor Software into the open source realm was of great interest – and surprise – to our Safe Software contingent. We’ve used Norm Olsen’s technology (Norm is Mentor) since 1996, and it has always been a pleasure working with him. A quick review of my email archives turned up this note I received from Norm in 1997. I’ve included it here as an indication of the type of service he has always provided to his customers:

1) I have received your message and data file.
2) Have reproduced the problem on my system.
3) Am debugging it now.
4) Problem is not obvious, but will have a fix for you by tomorrow.

True to his word, Norm did have a fix the next day. (For those interested, the problem in question should have been impossible to create in the Canadian NTV2 grid shift file.) Norm’s arrival at FOSS4G was a very nice surprise – he’s a celebrity among Safe staff and we enjoyed exchanging coordinate system war stories together. At most social gatherings a comment like, “How about that Malaysian RSO system anyway – what were the British thinking?” tends to clear out the room…but not at FOSS4G! We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Norm, though in a new way, now that CSMAP has gone open source.

Dale and Norm Olsen at FOSS4G

Other highlights of FOSS4G included the sheer concentration of collective expertise present – our staff certainly learned much from the conference. As one of the commercial software vendors present, I can report that we certainly felt welcomed by the open-source crowd; both of our ten minute demo theatre shows were packed. It was very helpful to see the range of development going on. An awareness of this work ultimately helps us to serve our customers better by enabling us to focus our efforts in ways that complement or otherwise add value to existing initiatives.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by our demos, our lab session, or checked out our booth – we enjoyed meeting you and hope we’ll see you again, maybe next year in South Africa!