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<h1 class="western">End of life for Community Mapbuilder</h1>
<p>We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the
time has come for the <a href="http://communitymapbuilder.org/">Community
Mapbuilder</a>
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. </p>
<h2 class="western">Why?</h2>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 class="western">But we are not crying</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 class="western">What should Mapbuilder users do?</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 class="western">What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo?</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I suggest a new “retired” category be created which keeps track of
retired projects.</p>
<h2 class="western">Thanks</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance):
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Cameron Shorter</p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Mike Adair</p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Patrice Cappelaere</p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Steven M. Ottens</p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Matt Diez</p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Olivier Terral </p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Andreas Hocevar </p>
</li>
<li>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Gertjan van Oosten </p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Linda Derezinski </p>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html">http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html</a>
</pre>
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