OpenGeo, the world’s leading commercial open source geospatial company have announced their plans to support QGIS and the open source community behind it. QGIS is the most widely available open source GIS tool with a proven track record and an extensive plug-in ecosystem. It is widely regarded to have achieved feature parity with proprietary tools while being more stable, easier to use.
OpenGeo’s flagship product, the OpenGeo Suite, is a complete set of standards-based geospatial software that offers the fastest and easiest way to publish geospatial information on the web. The addition of QGIS incorporates a strong desktop tool into OpenGeo’s solid server offerings. Users of the OpenGeo Suite will now have a complete solution for creating, analyzing, publishing and consuming geospatial data and services without requiring any proprietary software.
Juan Marin, OpenGeo’s CTO, outlined the following areas of development:
Improve integration between QGIS and the OpenGeo Suite
Provide services such as maintenance, technical support, training, etc for QGIS
Enhance existing documentation, tutorials, and examples to make QGIS even easier to learn and use.
Help users collaborate around geospatial data with GeoGit, a scalable distributed versioning system for geospatial information.
Marin noted, “QGIS offers a truly open alternative that lowers barriers to entry and total cost of ownership. It’s also operating system agnostic and has no license fees. We feel it fits perfectly with our mission of extending the availability of geospatial open source software. But we’re not only impressed with the software, we respect the community that has built it and we look forward to supporting them however we can.”
About OpenGeo
OpenGeo is the world leader for commercial open source geospatial software. Our global customer base uses the OpenGeo Suite, a complete open source geospatial web services stack, to deploy solutions for web mapping, transportation, telecommunications, open government and a diverse range of other solutions. The OpenGeo Suite provides the best, continually updated geo web services platform along with maintenance agreements that include support and training. These agreements provide our customers with superior value and the growing functionality of continually enhanced open source geospatial software.
OpenGeo supports open source communities by employing key developers of PostGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers. We are committed to the ideals of open source and aim to bring the best practices of open source software to organizations around the world.
