In the middle of the year, terrestris turned 20 years old. We would like to take this opportunity to bring important events and projects out of the darkness of the past and put them back in the spotlight many years later. In today’s article in this series, we want to look at the development of our active participation in the Open Source Geo-Community over the last 20 years.

Yes, how do you start a business when one of two people is fresh out of university and the other mainly has experience in selling proprietary GIS software; in other words, when you have hardly any experience? In the first few weeks after the company was founded, I remembered a map server that a former colleague had shown me – the UMN MapServer. After several attempts, I managed to compile and run the then current version – it must have been some 3.x version – on a Linux PC. After initial success in integrating a UMN MapServer service into a simple HTML client, the idea came up to develop a converter that translated ArcView 3 projects into a UMN Mapfile – the name was quickly found: AveiN! (ArcVIew simply on the Net!).

The first version of the ArcView 3 extension was a seemingly endless questionnaire, in which dialog followed dialog and where a functioning mapfile was actually written out in the end. We were proud – and at the same time the question arose as to how this programming feat could be marketed profitably. After some consideration and experimentation, the idea finally arose to make the software available as Open Source, but to sell the manual for the price of 50 euros. Basically, you can say that this is how the business model was born: develop open source and sell our knowledge, even if it later became a service.

ArcView 3 became ArcMap 8 and AveiN! became AmeiN! and for us the opportunity arose to develop a great logo: The AmeiNsenbear.

Interestingly, the intensive work with the UMN MapServer then relatively quickly led to the first projects, because at the beginning of the millennium the demand for the possibility to put GIS maps on the net was high, but the supply was rather modest. From then on, we earned our money by selling our knowledge to customers in the form of services – and that has remained the case to this day – and AmeiN! and AveiN! then relatively quickly became a thing of the company’s past. However, further projects followed, such as in 2008 the attempt to develop a purely JavaScript-based WebGIS client: The project “Koyukuk” (the name comes from a tributary of the Yukon River) was then overtaken by the development of OpenLayers and discontinued without ever being used productively.

In order not to have to constantly reinvent the wheel, we have always tried in the past 2 decades to extract commonalities from customer projects in terms of software technology, and thus to create synergies for everyone. This is also the background of our core framework for WebGIS SHOGun. After initially exclusively internal development, this was also published on GitHub more than 10 years ago (this version is now outdated (deprecated) and should no longer be used). Many years later, we still use the stack, which has been completely renewed several times in the meantime, and follow both old principles (client-server, central entity management, Java 7 Spring / Hibernate, REST …) and ideas, but can also use state-of-the-art technologies (such as WebSockets, GraphQL, Keycloak …) and serve current paradigms (containerization, cloud computing, …).

We had a very similar experience with the question of how we want to design geodata cartographically in the various contexts in which we work. In addition, our customers often wanted an interface to manually design their own data themselves. Together with our partner meggsimum, we developed the idea for a generic geodata styler, which, in addition to a user interface, also aims to harmonize differences between different display formats and allows a translation from format A to B. The GeoStyler was born and is now 4 years later a successful, versatile and well-regarded OSGeo Community project that is being further developed by a wide range of institutions and individuals.

Active participation can and should include various activities: Participation in discussions (mostly in public forums), testing of new versions of software already in use, assistance and documentation, reporting errors and, if necessary, contributing to their sustainable solution, financial support, architectural or organizational-controlling participation, organization of code sprints, participation in conferences and other events, and also a fundamental representation of the philosophy and the OSS components. In the past 20 years, we have contributed to the various geo-software components in all these ways. But we didn’t know all this 20 years ago.

Today, many years later, terrestris is involved in the development of many international open source projects – OpenLayers, GeoStyler, deegree, GeoServer, Mr. Map, Masterportal or MapFish Print – to name just a few. We are sure that we will continue to be involved in a variety of ways in well-known and newly created projects in the future: Open Source and Free Software are in our genes, even if the main developer of AveiN! doesn’t touch any code these days…