How To Make Money With Open Source? Hint: Sell Something

April 19th, 2019

Free and open source software is creating a lot of value. Maintainers however are often capturing no value from their work, rarely out of choice and often times because those individuals and companies that could contribute and fund the development of a project choose not to. And you can’t fault them. People need to ditch donations/crowdsourcing/patronization models and start selling something instead. Read the slides from my recent presentation at FOSS4G-NA: Please Sell Something – FOSS Funding for the Next […]

The SIFT patent has almost expired

April 4th, 2019

Correction from 10/9/2019: I thought the patent had expired this year, due to the confusion on the Priority Date vs. Filing Date. The patent is still in effect, and is set to expire March of 2020. As of March 7th of next year, the SIFT patent will expire in the U.S. U.S. patents are valid for 20 years from the earliest filing date, but can be extended to 21 years if a Priority Date is used, and SIFT (US6711293B1) was […]

Introducing Contours in WebODM

April 2nd, 2019

With the 0.9 release of WebODM we are introducing the ability to preview and export contours directly from map view. This has been a much requested feature and we decided to take on the work to implement it. Behind the curtains we used the GRASS GIS engine which already powers the volume measurement plugin to do the contours calculation, with some help from GDAL/OGR. The beauty of using a familiar language to power these computations is that it’s really easy […]