FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona

I was at the last FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) Conference in Barcelona. It was a fantastic conference with more than 800 participants from all over the world and 3 days of technical talks and trainings (http://2010.foss4g.org/program_print.php). It was great to meet major figures of the Open Source for Geospatial like Paul Ramsey (founder of PostGIS - see http://blog.opengeo.org/2010/09/08/foss4g-day-2/) or Frank Warmerdam (founder of GDAL). CampToCamp (http://www.camptocamp.com/) and 52north (http://www.52north.org) were very well represented in the talks and there was interesting new projects like GeoNodes (http://geonode.org/) founder by OpenGeo (http://opengeo.org/), ZOO Project and MapProxy from OmniScale.

Speeches during the plenary sessions were more about the spirit of Open Source and the sense of Community. As a contrast to the ESRI User Conference, the focus was not on technical stuff as most of the audience were tech-sawy but more on the philosophy of Open Source. Ivan Sanchez made an interesting comparison with the game theory showing that in software development the only winning move was to share. The conclusion was that happiness rather than money helps people create better products because it helps them to take better decisions (see the “prisoner dilemna”). His conclusion was that : Happiness leads to better software and maps :-)

During the closing session, Helena Mitasova received the OsGeo 2010 prize for her implication in Open Source and GRASS. She presented how GRASS has been used over the past 20 years to develop the geospatial research and education. It was inspiring how she spoke greatly about the community and about the energy that it gives her.