News on ESRI's Open Source activities

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi,
some more news regarding 52n on the ESRI Germany hompage:
http://www.esri-germany.de/news/esri_news/articles/n061009.html

It reads like OSGeo with a special focus on SDI, the wording is practically exchangeable. 52N was registered 2004-10-21 11:36 as a project at SourceForge while the above news regards the foundation of the company 52n this September (just in time for the Intergeo).

I chatted with Gunther Pichler (ex OGC Europe, now with ESRI Germany) at the Intergeo fair and he confirmed that ESRI is taking this project seriously and wants to especially tap on the academic and research potential of the folks involved with 52N. 

52N had a booth at the OSGeo Open Source Park a week ago (I still owe a report in the Wiki on that event) and they were also present and interested at FOSS4G. It will be interesting to follow this development as it is yet another tentative Open Source contact by a proprietary vendor. Chris also talked to the people involved with 52n and reported in the board list, its available in the archives. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf.