[OSGeo-Discuss] Origins Of OpenJUMP

[Landon Blake]

Rich,

I'll respond to your questions in a separate thread. :] (I invite any
other OSGeo members that work with OpenJUMP or UDig to correct mistakes
or add details to my post.)

JUMP was originally developed by Vivid Solutions with some assistance
(I'm not sure how much) by Refractions Research. I believe the funding
for the development for JUMP came from some source in the Canadian
government. (This source was one of the Canadian Provinces, if I
remember correctly.)

At some point funding was awarded for "JUMP 2". This time the funds went
to Refractions Research. Their development team had identified some of
the design flaws in the original JUMP, and decided to fix these. In the
end they decided to go with a completely new design, and UDig was the
result.

In the meantime Steve Tanner and some other JUMP users decided to fork
the code base for JUMP. This was not done hastily. It's been a while
since all this happened, and I'm not clear on every detail, but I
believe one main reason we forked was a desire to internationalize
JUMP's source code. The bottom line is that Vivid Solutions was (in my
modest opinion) unresponsive to outside developers desire to make
reasonable improvements or even contribute patches. At the same time
they were doing very little with the code base themselves. This is what
led to the fork. At one point we had a handful of different individual
developers and organization maintaining their own versions of JUMP, and
we realized we could all get together and benefit from a common core. 

This is still how OpenJUMP operates. We've got guys that maintain their
own code bases with individual tools and modifications, but they all
make a good effort to port the best (and least controversial) stuff back
to the core. There really is no formal governance mechanism in place. We
all get along well and try to help each other out.

There are some issues with our model of development. We don't have a
great release cycle, although that has been discussed in the last few
months, and developer turnover can be fairly high. I'm also easily
distracted, and I have to exercise self discipline to finish as task
once I start it. I must regretfully admit this has not helped the
project. (I'm consciously working on that personality flaw.)

A couple of interesting things to note:

- Our relationship with Vivid Solutions seems to have improved over the
course of the last year. The two developers at the company that are "in
charge" of JUMP occasionally help out with a problem on the OpenJUMP
mailing list, and users of JUMP and OpenJUMP share a common mailing
list. We've even talked about the possibility of merging JUMP and
OpenJUMP back to a common core, but I think this is unlikely without
some major funding at Vivid Solutions.

- Had Steve and I known about Refractions Research involvement with
"JUMP 2" OpenJUMP and UDig would probably be the same program. I look at
this with deep regret, although I don't think it is anyone's fault in
particular. Still, I think about what the JUMP user community could have
accomplished with Refractions Research and I get little tears in my
eyes. :] 

Still, I get a kick out of Jody Garnett, and I hope OpenJUMP and
GeoTools/UDig can work together more in the future. We definitely have
some different approaches to certain aspects of software design, but I
think at a minimum we can share data I/O or data access code and map
projection code.

Landon





-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Greenwood [mailto:richard.greenwood at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 7:32 PM
To: Landon Blake
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models

On Jan 3, 2008 4:37 PM, Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com> wrote:

> I think OpenJUMP might be an example of the opposite case. In this
situation the less-than-ideal management of a FOSS GIS program by a
private company led to a fork. The fork was made, not by another
company, but by a group of individual users/developers.

I'm interested in more details of the history and relationship between
Jump, OpenJump, and uDig. I think OpenJump and uDig have roots in
Jump, which was started by Martin Davis, or am I incorrect? And the
fork came about when? And why?

Maybe you would prefer to reply directly to the OSGeo-Discuss thread
"FOSS4GIS business models", but I'm afraid my questions are tangential
to that thread.

Rich

-- 
Richard Greenwood
richard.greenwood at gmail.com
www.greenwoodmap.com


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