I remember Mike Adair's demo of MapBuilder to me, long ago at an OGC
meeting, and how impressed I was. The kinds of things they were doing
were ground-breaking. I think the entire Geo FOSS community has been
strengthened by the accomplishments of this project. I can understand
the bittersweet nature of an announcement like this. I tip my hat to
the entire MapBuilder steering committee for their obviously deep
commitment to the OSGeo cause.
This is truly an example of thinking globally!
Allan
On Jul 28, 2008, at 7:02 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
End of life for Community Mapbuilder
We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the
time has come for the Community Mapbuilder project to gracefully
retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software,
and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The
web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and
we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect
Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history.
Why?
Mapbuilder is a stable, feature rich, standards compliant, fast,
webmapping framework with a strong developer community. Why has it
come to the end of its life?
The browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other
webmapping clients have increased in functionality and
attractiveness to users. In particular, Openlayers is simpler to
use, has attracted an increabibly strong developer community, has
good quality control and development processes, and has developed
most of the webmapping functionality previously only offered by
Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is attacting the majority of the
users and developers that previously would have used Mapbuilder. One
day someone will write a compelling paper on the history of the two
similar projects and analyse the key differences and decision points
which led to one project out shining the other.
But we are not crying
Well, maybe we feel a twing of loss for the Mapbuilder project we
started years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of
Mapbuilder as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping
community to consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping
tools – in particular, around Openlayers.
There has been significant collaboration between the Mapbuilder and
Openlayers communities over the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has
incorporated Openlayers as its rendering engine and fetures have
been shared between projects. In many cases, developers from both
projects worked together on the same codebase (in Openlayers), then
ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a deliberate move toward the
merging of the two developer communities and most of the Mapbuilder
Project Steering Committee have contributed to the Openlayers
codebase.
So in essence, by changing our allegience from Mapbuilder to
Openlayers we take with us some of our code, we replace some
features with equivalent Openlayers features, we take our community
with us, and we gain an existing, robust and welcoming community.
What should Mapbuilder users do?
Users have a few options. You already own the source code, so you
are welcome to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder
code for as long as you like. At some point, users will likely want
to upgrade, and at that point we suggest considering Openlayers for
your application. It now provides the majority of the fuctionality
that was previously only offered by Mapbuilder.
What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo?
Having a graduated OSGeo project retire might be seen as an
embarassment for OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It
shows two projects growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and
evenually merging into a stronger, more focused community.
However, it does raise a dilemma with regards to what should be done
with a retired project. Some of the key OSGeo criteria, like
“Community Backing” and “Best of Breed Software” will gradually be
lost, so we should not continue to promote Mapbuilder. Still, we
wouldn't want to erase Mapbuilder's history with OSGeo as our
community has documented valuable lessons learned during the
graduation process.
I suggest a new “retired” category be created which keeps track of
retired projects.
Thanks
We, the project steering committee, have derived a huge amount of
pleasure building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder
Community. For many of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into
a fullfilling Open Source and/or Geospatial career. We'd like to
thank all the users, developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have
met along the way.
The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance):
Cameron Shorter
Mike Adair
Patrice Cappelaere
Steven M. Ottens
Matt Diez
Olivier Terral
Andreas Hocevar
Gertjan van Oosten
Linda Derezinski
--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html
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Allan Doyle
Director of Technology
MIT Museum | http://web.mit.edu/museum | +1.617.452.2111
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