Mapbender is first officially approved project| Foundation reaches hundreds of members| OSGeo presents at OSCON and GeoWeb

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) announced today that Mapbender, a portal-based suite of
software for geodata management using OGC OWS architectures, has met all of the legal and community
requirements to become the first official product supported by the Foundation. Just six months after its
inception, the Foundation is already starting to make an impact on the geospatial industry, providing a
degree of quality assurance for open source geospatial software users and getting its message out to the GIS
community at conferences and tradeshows.

The Foundation was formed early in 2006 by a diverse collection of open source advocates with the aim of
supporting and promoting open source geospatial projects. In only six months, the Foundation&apo;s mailing lists
are reaching hundreds of developers and users across the industry, with hundreds more also registered on the
OSGeo website (www.osgeo.org). Already the Foundation has eight projects in incubation, all open source
tools and applications that range from low-level libraries to web services environments to a broad function
desktop GIS. „We have enjoyed a great deal of support everywhere we have taken the OSGeo message,“ says
Frank Warmerdam, Foundation president. „And through the OSGeo incubation process we are able to provide a
high degree of confidence in OSGeo approved projects on issues from intellectual property to healthy
community functioning.“

In addition to supporting actual software development, a big part of OSGeo&apo;s mission is to promote the use
of open source software and public data within the GIS industry like on its well-publicized success at
Where 2.0 earlier this summer.