[OSGeo-Discuss] End of life for Community Mapbuilder

[Allan Doyle]

I remember Mike Adair's demo of MapBuilder to me, long ago at an OGC  
meeting, and how impressed I was. The kinds of things they were doing  
were ground-breaking. I think the entire Geo FOSS community has been  
strengthened by the accomplishments of this project. I can understand  
the bittersweet nature of an announcement like this. I tip my hat to  
the entire MapBuilder steering committee for their obviously deep  
commitment to the OSGeo cause.

This is truly an example of thinking globally!

	Allan

On Jul 28, 2008, at 7:02 AM, 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 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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> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
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-- 
Allan Doyle
Director of Technology
MIT Museum | http://web.mit.edu/museum | +1.617.452.2111



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