This wiki page has been setup to allow a community filling of the OSGEO incubation questionnaire. Please participate in answering the questions/correcting the existing answers

GeoServer sources are assigned to a single legal entity, The Open Planning Project, as reported by the source code headers:

/* Copyright (c) 2001 - 2007 TOPP - www.openplans.org. All rights reserved.
 * This code is licensed under the GPL 2.0 license, available at the root
 * application directory.
 */

{info} A mail address is missing. Not sure what to insert here. Maybe Chris Holmes one? {info}

The project is controlled by a Project Streering commitee composed by:

• Alessio Fabiani
• Andrea Aime
• Chris Holmes (Chair)
• Jody Garnett
• Justin Deoliveira
• Rob Atkinson
• Simone Giannecchini

{info} Mail addresses will be added only in the final mail to OSGEO to avoid spambots {info}

Current committers are listed in the Xircles GeoServer developer page

• jdeolive - Justin Deoliveria - OpenGeo
• afabiani - Alessio Fabiani - GeoSolutions
• jgarnett - Jody Garnett - Lisasoft
• groldan - Gabriel Roldan - OpenGeo
• cholmes - Chris Holmes - OpenGeo
• dgricci - Richard Didier - IGN France
• aaime - Andrea Aime - OpenGeo
• tschaub - Tim Schaub - OpenGeo
• dwinslow - David Winslow - OpenGeo
• arneke - Arne Kepp - OpenGeo
• mbarto - Mauro Bartolomeoli - Esalab
• robatkinson - Rob Atkinson - AuScope / CSIRO Land and Water
• iwillig - Ivan Willig - OpenGeo
• simboss - Simone Giannecchini - GeoSolutions
• bmmpxf - Mike Pumphrey - OpenGeo
• bencaradocdavies - Ben Caradoc-Davies - AuScope / CSIRO Exploration and Mining
• rpenate - Rolando Peñate - OpenGeo
• tenzochris - Chris Patterson - OpenGeo
• sbenthall - Sebastian Benthall - OpenGeo
• dany111 - Daniele Romagnoli - GeoSolutions
• francesco.izzi - Francesco Izzi - CNR Italy
• mcr - Christian Mueller - Independent consultant
• riniangreani - Rini Angreani - AuScope / Curtin University of Technology
• agerber - Alan Gerber - OpenGeo
• etj - Emanuele Tajariol - GeoSolutions
• awright - Alyssa Wright - OpenGeo
• mleslie - Mark Leslie - LisaSoft

We thank previous committers for all the hard work in GeoServer. They been removed during the OSGEO preparation cleanup so that the actual committer list shows the ones that have been active:

• jmacgill - James McGill
• louiecw - Clint Lewis
• saul.farber - Saul Farber
• bowens - Brent Owens
• oliver - Oliver Loe
• jeichar - Jesse Eichar
• chorner - Cory Horner
• rgould - Richard Gould
• benguela - Pablo Casado
• quintona - Quinton Anderson
• amanfredi - Anthony Manfredi
• kc7bfi - David Robison
• cedricbr - Cédric Briançon
• kappu72 - Andrea Cappugi
• ominiverdi - Lorenzo Becchi
• gdavis - Graham Davis
• lreed - Lucas Reed
• nicastel - Nicolas CASTEL
• rmgold - Rick Goldberg
• tcoulter - Tim Coulter

GeoServer is a Java-based web GIS server with a strong focus on implementing Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specification while keeping an eye for other popular Web GIS communication protocols such as REST. GeoServer is the references implementation of WFS 1.0 and 1.1, WCS 1.1, and a compliant server for WMS 1.1 and WCS 1.0.

For a longer answer see the GeoServer description page on the GeoServer site: http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/What+is+GeoServer

It raises visibility and makes for a natural match that people out there are expecting to see.

Web GIS server.

GeoServer lives and breaths in an open source environment, so it relates, to various degrees, to many open source projects.

Here is a list of the geospatial ones:

• GeoTools: heavily used to all data access, rendering, referencing subsystem. GeoServer developers have a policy to contribute back to GeoTools whatever code has the potential to be shared with other projects
• GeoWebCache: can be used as a plugin to provide tile caching services
• OpenLayers: GeoServer ships with OpenLayers to provide functionality demos and map previews
• GeoExt: some extensions use GeoExt components to provide advanced javascript based user interfaces for interacting with maps or editing styles
• PostGIS: GeoServer provides best functionality when coupled with a PostGIS data store
• OGR: as an extension it’s possible to use ogr2ogr as the generator of WFS outputs that GeoServer cannot natively produce
• Imageio-ext and GDAL: open source project leveraging GDAL to provide access to formats that are not natively understood by the Java libraries, such as ECW, JPEG200, MrSid, HDF, just to name a few

The technical underpinning of GeoServer also use a number of non geospatial libraries, such as Spring, Apache Commons, Xerces, Wicket, Log4J, PicoContainer, FreeMarker, XStream, Batik, H2 database and Jetty, just to name some.

The GeoServer community involves developers that are paid by commercial companies and “dot-org” ones, such as OpenGeo, GeoSolutions, LisaSoft and Refractions research, and by public institutions, such as AUSCOPE. Most importantly thought, the community is made of people, not of companies or institutions.

GeoServer can work without the aid of any commercial software, but it can talk to some, for example it has data stores for Oracle and ArcSDE, as well as readers for closed formats such as MrSID or ECW. The approach is to privilege open source whilst still being able to work in a partially proprietary envoriment.

The source code is released under the GPL V2 license, although there are talks to release some of the core classes under a less restrictive licence so that it’s possible to develop closed source plugins.

GeoServer has a long stable release history with tens of stable releases over various years. The current stable version is 1.7.6 with GeoServer 2.0 approaching stability.

The software originated years ago at a no profit called “Visions for New York”. The no profit needed to use streets and traffic information and needed a way to deal with it on a level that went beyond just displaying maps. At the same time OGC came out with the WFS specification, which was considered a good match in that it provided not just pictures, but the “source” of the geographic information. The work was started to implement the WFS 1.0 specification, and as a result GeoServer was born.

Over the years various people joined the project and improved the number of services supported, the data formats accessed and generated, and a UI was provided too.

GeoServer is reference implementation of OGC WFS 1.1, WFS 1.0 and WCS 1.1. It’s also certified compliant for WMS 1.1 and WCS 1.0. Every stable release of GeoServer must pass all CITE tests for any implemented standard before being released to the public.

All the file headers report “The Open Planning Project” as the copyright owner. All new committers are required to sign a copyright assignment agreement towards “The Open Planning Project”. However, not all older committers have signed such an agreement so some extra work is required in this area.

We are not aware of patent or trademarks infringements in the code base but some due diligence is in order to double check.

A scan in the svn logs over the project trunk and the active 1.7.x branch over the last few months (approximately since February 2009) reveals 19 active committers:

• Andrea Aime
• Alan Gerber
• Alessio Fabiani
• Arne Kepp
• Alyssa Wright
• Ben Caradoc-Davies
• Mike Pumphrey
• Daniele Romagnoli
• Didier Richard
• David Winslow
• Gabriel Roldan
• Jody Garnett
• Justin DeOliveira
• Mauro Bartolomeoli
• Christian Mueller
• Rini Angreani
• Rob Atkison
• Simone Giannecchini
• Chris Patterson

The list has been obtained using the following commands on July 24 2009:

svn log https://svn.codehaus.org/geoserver/trunk --xml --limit 1000 | grep "<author>" | sort | less
svn log https://svn.codehaus.org/geoserver/branches/1.7.x --xml --limit 500 | grep "<author>" | sort | less

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The SourceForge download counters routinely report downloads in the order of the 10 thousands each month. Mailing list wise, as of July 24 2009:

• the users mailing list has 677 non digested users and 215 digested ones.
• the developers mailing list has 300 non digested users and 83 digested ones.

It seems to attract a wide variety of users, government, commercial, students and research.

We don’t intend to join OSGeo because of the infrastructure, but because we share the same principles and we feel like part of the OSGeo community.

That said, moving SVN and eventually the mailing lists over to OSGeo infrastructure is under consideration.

The projects has two build bot that routinely polls the version control and builds GeoServer:

• http://hudson.opengeo.org/hudson/ (Linux builds)
• http://hudson.opengeo.org/win32/ (daily Windows builds)

The bot also generates a nightly build of every active branch for users to check out progress:

• http://hudson.opengeo.org/hudson/

The source code contains 272 test classes, each executing multiple unit tests, totalling 1124 separate tests (computed using “cat `find . name "*Test.java"` | grep "void test" | wcl” on the GeoServer trunk checkout).

Also, before pushing out a release all CITE tests against the core services are run, adding between one and two thousands other tests to the mix.

Java

English

A release comprises various packaging and plug-ins to satisfy different needs. At the moment each packaging is around 45MB (each user is expected to download only one of the different packaging, as they are usually native installers which are plaftform dependent) and the plugin size varies between the few kilobytes and some megabytes.

Summing up the various native installers and packaging formats, and the extensions, the disk space used by a single release is around 200MB.