Wednesday, March 30, 2011
I was reading the latest ArcNews and took some time to carefully read the Open Source Technology and Esri article. I'm very pleased Esri is beginning to address open source formally. The article highlights some of the misconceptions about open source, which is always welcome. I learned that Esri uses two different open source licenses in its current list of two open source products. The OSM Editor is under a Microsoft Public License and the GeoPortal Extension is under Apache 2.0. Interesting.
More interesting? This comment about the open API for the file geodatabase:
Esri's most recent API, the File Geodatabase API, while not yet open source, opens up the file geodatabase for developers to create applications that access file geodatabases from a variety of outside environments without using ArcObjects.
It's that "yet" that struck me. I was not aware Esri planned to open the API up under and open source license. I thought the end goal was "just" an API. Did I read that right? What benefit would the API itself being open source mean to Esri? To the developer community?
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