It is now 20 years since the University of Minnesota (UMN) MapServer 3.0 was made open source. Daniel Morissette (@dmorissette) has posted a bit of interesting history on Twitter about the early days of open source and UMN MapServer, the Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and the annual meetings that evolved into FOSS4G. I have augmented Daniel’s material with more history from Markus Neteler (@MarkusNeteler) and other sources.
1994: University of Minnesota awarded NASA/ForNet funding to support web-based delivery of forestry data.
1997: MapServer 1.0, Developed as Part of the NASA ForNet Project. MapServer project led by Steve Lime (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lime-353231122/).
1998: MapServer 2.0 released as final ForNET deliverable; added reprojection support (PROJ.4).
1999: UMN makes MapServer 3.0 an open source project.
2000: Release of Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) by Frank Warmerdam (@nfwarmerdam). Now used by over 30 commercial and other applications including ArcGIS.
2001: The initial implementation of OGC Web Map Service (WMS) in MapServer was supported by funding from Canadian Forest Service.
2001: Paul Ramsey (@pwramsey) then at Refractions adds PostGIS support to MapServer
2002: The CWC2 (Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure WMS Client Components) project becomes the open source Chameleon framework.
2002: GRASS Users conference, Trento, Italy – 150 people
2003: First MapServer User Meeting (MUM1), Minneapolis, Minnesota – 90 people
2004: FOSS4G: GRASS Users Conference, Bangkok, Thailand – 150+ people
2004: MUM2 and Open Source GIS Conference, Ottawa, Canada – 200+ people
2004: Release of The Atlas of Canada WMS Service powered by MapServer. Still serving 10 million WMS maps/month today
2005: MUM3 and Open Source Geospatial Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota – 300+ people
2005: MapServer Technical Steering Committee (TSC) created.
2005: Autodesk, MapServer Technical Steering Committee Members, the University of Minnesota, and DM Solutions Group announced the creation of the MapServer Foundation which ultimately became OSGEO.
2006: Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) created with eight founding projects. MUM and GRASS users meetings become FOSS4G events.
2007: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference (FOSS4G) 2007, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 700 attendees
2009: First C Tribe Code Sprint in Toronto thanks to Tom Kralidis (@tomkralidis) and Paul Ramsey.
2017: FOSS4G Boston, Massachussets – 1150 attendees. In addition regional FOSS4G conferences are held in North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Japan, Africa, and other regions and countries.
2019: OSGEO supports 24 projects + several community projects.
I became involved with the open source geospatial community in 2005. I was at Autodesk at the time and together with Dave McIlhagga of DM Solutions, which was using MapServer commercially, managed to attract the interest of Gary Lang, who was responsible for Geospatial development at Autodesk. As a result Autodesk supported the formation of the OSGEO for its first three years and contributed three open source projects, MapGuide Open Source, Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology, and CS-Map.
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