[mapguide-internals] Re: Active Developers?

[Ivan Miličević]

It's a little OT.. But does anybody besides me realize how dead MG would be without Jackie's contribution?

Personally, Mapguide is a good product a solid platform for building GIS apps. It's true that development has stagnated but major contribution cannot be made without real requirements. Honestly, only ADSK can made that this product move ahead because of the complex codebase and integration with Infrastructure Server and let me to be a clear, ADSK should do more than sit and watch. They initiate to open this product to OpenSource and they must continue to push it up. The first step would be to open DWG file format trough FDO. Editing, people what's to edit their dana online. ADSK made so many tools for editing online but nothing has been "donated" to this project. I understand that a current viewer has some specific limits but let0s suppress them. Acad online have a very nice GUI and editing capabilities.

And on the very end, Mapguide internals should ask and listen current users what they want to see in the future releases. Let's make a pool.

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jackie Ng
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 1:30 PM
To: mapguide-internals at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [mapguide-internals] Re: Active Developers?

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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