Autodesk donates CS-Map to OSGeo after Mentor Purchase

Autodesk announced today at FOSS4G2007 here in Victoria, that CS-Map is being donated to OSGeo and the Open Source community.

The Press Release shows Autodesk's commitment to Open Source and this paradigm of development and collaboration.

For anyone who has worked with Norm Olsen's libraries (CS-Map was developed by Mentor Software), you realise his work has filtered into many industries worldwide.

Schlumberger Information Solutions has used Norm's libraries for many years in the Finder Data Management software - one of the tools I used for many years while working for them.

Frank Warmerdam, OSGeo President, states in the Press Release "The latest planned contribution supports theprojections and transformations necessary to support over 3,000 coordinatesystems worldwide and has capabilities not previously available to the opensource community. I am also very excited to have Norm Olsen joining thecommunity and I look forward to increased community collaboration andinnovation-hallmarks of the open source community."

As you know Geodesy and Map Projections have been my bread and butter and passion for many years - along with good ol'databases.

I look forward to hopefully working with Autodesk and OSGeo in implementing these libraries into the community with Frank Warmerdam and his PROJ.4 libraries.

This is indeed good news for the Open Source community and OSGeo.