[OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder

[Milo van der Linden]

Hello Cameron!

Excellent decision! It takes a lot of courage to admit that the value of
a project is decreased because of the competition. Despite the fact that
some components of mapbuilder are really great!

I hope the knowledge of the people who worked on mapbuilder will find
its way into the OSGeo projects and that those people will find equal
pleasure in helping the other projects grow and mature!


Sincerely,

Milo van der Linden

Cameron Shorter wrote:
>   End of life for Community Mapbuilder
> 
> We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has 
> come for the Community Mapbuilder <http://communitymapbuilder.org/> 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.
> 
> 
>     Why?
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
>     But we are not crying
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
>     What should Mapbuilder users do?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
>     What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> I suggest a new “retired” category be created which keeps track of retired projects.
> 
> 
>     Thanks
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance):
> 
>     *
> 
>       Cameron Shorter
> 
>     *
> 
>       Mike Adair
> 
>     *
> 
>       Patrice Cappelaere
> 
>     *
> 
>       Steven M. Ottens
> 
>     *
> 
>       Matt Diez
> 
>     *
> 
>       Olivier Terral
> 
>     *
> 
>       Andreas Hocevar
> 
>     *
> 
>       Gertjan van Oosten
> 
>     *
> 
>       Linda Derezinski
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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
> http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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