Most of this week I am at Autodesk University in Las Vegas.  I don’t know the numbers, but last year there were about 5,000 participants, if I remember correctly, and this year there appears to me to be more.  Participants are primarily technical, so most of the sessions are technical.

Yesterday was focussed primarily on user groups, and among these was the MapGuide User Reception, which I attended.  The most remarkable thing in my mind was that this meeting was unlike any other event of a similar type that I have attended at AU in the past, and I think the reason was that the focus was on open source, specifically MapGuide Open Source.

Bob Bray, who is the architect of MapGuide, gave a presentation on MapGuide Open Source.   First of all he outlined some pretty remarkable current statistics.  To date there have been 23,000 downloads, one third of them Linux interestingly.  Surprisingly to most of us I think the monthly rate of downloads continues to climb.  The Feature Data Object (FDO) API, which is a separate open source project, has had 3,000 downloads.  Most interesting to me is the number of new FDO Data Providers, being developed by the community, including PostGIS, Oracle Locator/Spatial, GDAL, OGR, and FME2007.

But the most interesting thing to me and to others who have been at AU in the past is when Bob
oulined the process for defining the feature set for future versions of MapGuide Open Source.  This is unlike anything that people with closed source experience with product management would be familiar with.  I’ve included Bob’s slide, which outlines the Request for Comment (RFC) process, which I expect that anyone with Apache experience would recognize,  but that closed source product managers would definitely not.  The voting uses the Apache system where +1 means in favour, 0 means abstention, and -1 is a veto. 

Why the final sentence why am I telling you this ?  First of all you need to understand what the Project Steering Committee (PSC) is a group of community participants, currently seven people I believe, most of them not Autodesk and including only developers and users, no product managers.  Secondly, this is an open process conducted via email.  Thirdly, because it is open anyone in the community can submit the features that he or she thinks is critical.  This effectively gives power to add or modify features to the community.  It also means that new features can be implemented much more rapidly.  The RFC process in my mind is one of the most important advantages of open source software development, because if someone in the community needs a new feature this process empowers them to make it happen.  To me this is something that has enormous implications that it will take people with solely closed source experience some time to get their head around. 

Andy Morsell, an independent software developer, rounded off the presentations appropriately by describing his experience in progressing from a pure closed source background to his current perspective where he uses both models in his business activities.  Exciting times !