[mapguide-internals] Re: Active Developers?

[Jackie Ng]

Hi Craig,

You want an honest assessment of the MapGuide Open Source project? Well then
...

I personally think the MapGuide Open Source has stagnated. Not in terms of
users (the -users mailing list still has healthy activity, and there seems
to be a sizable group of knowledgeable users answering questions)

But rather, the project has stagnated due to the very small number of
non-Autodesk developers (like myself) knowledgeable about the architecture
and internals of MapGuide. With such a small community brains trust, it's
very hard for us to move the MapGuide project forward. Even after 5 years,
there's still parts of the MapGuide stack that I'm not intimately familiar
with and do not dare to touch as a result.

My theory as to why 2009 seems to be the year that things started to grind
to a halt? It's probably because of that thing called the GFC. I'd imagine
Autodesk was not immune and had to layoff a sizable chunk of their staff
like every other major corporation at the time and so you essentially had a
skeleton crew looking after the MapGuide product. That's my 2c on the matter
anyway.

Another major problem is the lack of users championing MapGuide. When was
the last FOSS4G event where someone talked about MapGuide or FDO? Besides my
own blog and ones from Autodesk, do you see anybody blogging or talking
about MapGuide on semi-regular basis? Gordon Luckett blogs stuff on an
occasional basis. Jason and Zac seemed to have problems writing things
longer than 140-characters :-) 

I'd like to think blogosphere activity as a useful barometer of how alive
and popular a particular project/product is, and going by this metric you
would have to say that MapGuide is either a dying project or a pretty
obscure one. My blog seems to be the defacto source for anything
MapGuide/FDO-related because I seem to be the only one outside of Autodesk
talking about it!

But we can change this state of affairs, the community just has to step up
to the plate. Not gonna lie here, monetary investment helps. One of the
major pain points of MapGuide Open Source (a performant and stable GDAL
raster provider) is solvable if there is community interest in funding it
(http://www.otxsystems.com/community-initiatives/gdal-provider-initiative.html).
I get this impression that the lack of monetary funding is due the "free
lunch" mentality associated with most Open Source projects. Well someone has
to get paid to make that lunch one way or another.

But it's not just monetary investments, but also investments of knowledge
and developer resources. Submit patches (I can review and submit on your
behalf if need be), improve the documentation, blog about MapGuide (even
simple things like how to do XYZ), talk about MapGuide at your next
GIS/Geospatial conference, get people interested in MapGuide. There's many
things that we as a community can do that does not involve writing code.

So the TL;DR - Not enough community effort/resourcing/advocacy. The
community can move MapGuide forward if they are willing to invest in it (not
just monetary). We can't (and shouldn't) have to rely on Autodesk.

- Jackie

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