Autodesk Continues Support for Open Source Community

The past year has seen some reorganization at Autodesk and not having heard much from the company recently, I decided to see where the company was headed with their geospatial products but as importantly, what was going on with support for the open source community. So, I reached out to my contacts and Peter Rieks, product manager for MapGuide Enterprise/FDO, and he had this to report:

"Our support for OSGeo, MapGuide Open Source, FDO and the CS-Map project really hasn’t changed much. If anything we are more active in the open source community, though these are hard times and we have significantly reduced our marketing $ expenditures:

•  Autodesk has recently signed up for another year of OSGeo sponsorship
•  Autodesk’s Geoff Zeiss appointed to OSGeo Board of Directors
•  Probably a dozen Autodesk developers as active contributors of OSGeo project code and head of Product Steering Committees (PSCs)
•  Autodesk continues to submit Open Source RFCs and fix defects as per our regular schedule tied to our commercial versions
•  Autodesk has handed over building of the MapGuide Open Source projects to the community to allow greater flexibility and control by the community in order to run independent of Autodesk’s commercial schedule
•  New releases of MapGuide Open Source 2.1 and FDO 3.4.1 in November 2009
•  Attended and exhibited at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney"

Reiks also commented that, "the reorg at Autodesk early last year and the stronger-than-ever industry focus means that we are focusing less on the traditional GIS market, and more the location aware or geospatially enabled industry business."

And even throughout 2009, it seemed like the company was focusing more on major themes like ARRA and infrastructure, building information models (BIM), and putting its marketing spin more on the civil engineering/geospatial integration story.