Open Source Success

As open-source software, PostGIS has gained much interest and credit from researchers and companies big and small, all over the world. In the geospatial domain, open-source libraries are finding their way into more and more proprietary products. What is the secret of OS success? Is it idealism or pragmatism that drives users into the arms of PostGIS? How will the software develop further? We asked Paul Ramsey, open-source guru in the geospatial domain.<P>

Paul Ramsey,OSGeo,Victoria, British Columbia, Ca­n­ada, email:pramsey@cleverelephant.ca
Practical considerations led Paul Ramsey to begin working with open-source geospatial software; in 2001 a client needed a spatial database for a project and the proprietary alternatives at the time were both expensive and bulky. The solution Ramsey and his company developed was PostGIS; it proved useful too in other projects for other clients, and was soon adopted as the standard spatial database for the open-source community. Today PostGIS is used globally by organisations differing in scale from graduate research project and community mapping to DigitalGlobe and NASA. Paul Ramsey is a director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), committed to several open-source projects and a popular speaker and teacher on open-source topics at geospatial conferences and workshops.