Slashgeo

All Points Blog tells us ESRI ArcGIS 9.2 uses GDAL. This is very good news for the open source community. GDAL is used by most open source geospatial projects. From the GDAL website: "As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. [...] The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data."

The GDAL mailing list tells us GDAL 1.4.0 has been released, it of course includes updates to OGR as well. Since the what's new is too long, here's what GDAL is: "As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing." These libraries are used by Google, ESRI and numerous open source geospatial projects.

The import cartography blog asks, and get answers, about geospatial software open source licenses which allow commercial applications. From the blog: "I've made proprietary MapServer-based sites -- sites available to paying users, but no downloadable code or configuration -- and when they required enhancements or fixes of MapServer, I made the improvements and then gave them back (with consent of my customers) to the MapServer community. However, most of my MapServer contributions were made through my work on community, for-the-public software. The same goes for MapServer in general: most recent work on MapServer was (i'm digging up the stats on lines of code) done to implement OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WCS, SLD) for public-facing Canadian government web sites." This is an important issue since open source geosoftware is more and more important (one simply has to think of ESRI and Google's uses of GDAL/OGR, amongst many).

The GDAL-Dev list indicated GDAL/OGR 1.4.1 has been released. From the announcement: " This is a "Stable Branch Release", which is something new for GDAL/OGR. That means it contains virtually no new features, but it does contain all important bug fixes since 1.4.0. It should be possible for anyone using GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 to upgrade to GDAL/OGR 1.4.1 with a minimum of concern of new bugs or disruptive changes." Here's the overview of changes. GDAL/OGR is arguably the most important geospatial open source software, being used by numerous open source geospatial projects and proprietary projects including Google and ESRI.

The GDAL mailing list announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.3. Here's the bugfix list and new features. GDAL is quite mature, being used by ESRI, Google, most open source geospatial software and many more. From the official site: "GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. [...] The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data." Copied below is a link to the previous story on comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. Update: 11/02 18:14 GMT by S : Wouhou! A colleague just made me realize the GDAL WMS driver is included in this release, and with little efforts, we made it work. This is great news and a new easy way to add WMS support for projects which uses GDAL/OGR. However, I don't know yet to which extent the driver can be considered mature or not.

Spatially Adjusted links to an interesting discussion over the OSGeo-Discuss mailing list about open source careers and whether open source GIS software are up to par vs commercial GIS [Nabble link]. SA picks an insightful quote from Paul Ramsey, formerly of the Refractions fame: "My general synopsis: for server-side, for scriptability, for automation, for web-based, open source wins for most use cases, given a technically savvy user; for ad hoc, for cartographic production, for a user who is used to a point-n-click experience end to end, proprietary still wins."

Slashgeo regularly covers open source geospatial software. I copied some previous related stories below. With 52 North, the OSGeo and all the open source geospatial software such as the widely used GDAL, we can say open source geospatial software is in a healthy situation. Note that we also cover commercial geospatial software, including from ESRI. Editor's note: I usually read the OSGeo list myself and share interesting bits with our users, since I've been away from office, expect more thorough coverage after the summer. Meanwhile, there's always submissions.