OSGeo anniversary, 5 years of freedom

by Jorge Sanz on

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These days OSGeo celebrates it’s 5th birthday, so I’ll try to answer some of the Tyler’s questions about where I was five years ago and more ore less what I’ve been doing on OSGeo for this time. It’s funny because it’s also my 5th anniversary at Prodevelop and working actively on the gvSIG project so it’s not just a matter of OSGeo in the end.

Five years ago I was working with an scholarship at the Polytechnic University of Valencia doing some research on GIS for Public Local Administrations and giving postgraduate courses on MapServer as a result of my final degree work. But the scholarship ended how to say… abruptly, thus I found myself out of the university I was studying and working since 1997.

Anyway, just two weeks later I started working at Prodevelop. I was really lucky because Prodevelop was looking for a cartographer well biased on computer science (my predecessor was impossible to be compared of but, well, they gave me a chance) so I started to work on a project to build the ArcIMS driver of gvSIG with Miguel Montesinos, Juan Lucas and Javier. Those days Prodevelop was a 25 people company, today we are more than 70, with a GIS team of 15 people more or less.

I started soon to take part on OSGeo, mainly at my free time translating the website into Spanish. Miguel and me attended FOSS4G in Lausanne and was a great experience, the Spanish Local Chapter started next year with the first FOSS4G meeting in Girona thanks to Lorenzo Becchi and Luis Sevilla who coordinated the kick off for the Local Chapter.

Afterwards gvSIG joined OSGeo and my relationship with OSGeo grew from only on my free time to being part of my daily tasks, like participating on the OSGeo Live DVD project, presenting OSGeo and OSGeo-ES anywhere (from Valencia to Caracas) or participating as a gvSIG lecturer on last year FOSS4G workshops.

On those years I’ve made so many friends that I can only say I’m very proud to take part of this big community. I’m a not-so-good developer and most of my time at gvSIG project is doing coordination and helping others to develop new cool things but anyway, OSGeo and gvSIG are big efforts that need help of very different roles so I don’t find myself out-of-place. On the contrary, I enjoy a lot participating at OSGeo and OSGeo-ES, even when there are some not good aspects (like having to see privative software companies sponsoring FOSS4G) the general balance is without any doubt positive.

Happy birthday OSGeo community!!

Updated: 2022-02-27, Version: f993992.