Maybe someday PostGIS will go to 11, but for now, we’re still shooting for 2, point oh. And happily we are getting closer and closer. We have moved to a weekly schedule of alpha releases (this week was alpha3) and have started cleaning down the list of tickets against the 2.0 milestone.

Last month, much of the time spent by me and Sandro Santilli on PostGIS 2.0 preparation was funded by the Humanitarian Information Unit of the US Department of State. So, from the PostGIS development team, and the PostGIS community in general: thanks, HIU! Why is HIU funding PostGIS? Because the kinds of tools that HIU and its partners use for humanitarian response are backed by PostGIS, and they want to see those tools get better. Funding PostGIS development is an economical way to simultaneously raise the capabilities of a whole ecosystem of tools in HIU’s space.

GeoServer 2.1.0 was released late last week, after almost a full year of development work. You can read about the full details of all of the new features on the GeoServer Blog.

There are over a dozen new headline features, some of them quite large improvements: WMS 1.3, WMS Cascading, virtual services, GeoWebCache direct WMS integration. What do all of these new features have in common? They were all funded by organizations who are using GeoServer and want to see it develop and thrive. Some developments were made possible by OpenGeo, some by other commercial providers such as GeoSolutions and Refractions Research. A few were funded by OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition clients. All of these organizations may not have much in common operationally, yet their funding of this open source project has made a valuable software tool even more valuable for everyone.

We want to specifically thank those organizations who have contributed to GeoServer during this release cycle:

• Ordnance Survey - WMS 1.3.0
• MassGIS - WCS limits
• OBIS - Layers from SQL
• Landgate - Virtual Services
• SWECO - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• Malmö City of Sweden - SLD Unit of Measure, DPI scaling
• University of Perugia - WMS Cascading

As we reflect on this milestone, we should remember that GeoServer is everyone’s project. Whether you just play around and report a bug or are a state agency using GeoServer in production, you are part of a large and thriving community. Your work, and your funding, helps improve the software.

So the next time someone asks why one would pay for ‘free’ software, take a look at this list. GeoServer is yours—and your funding makes it happen.

Look for GeoServer 2.1.0 as part of the next version of the OpenGeo Suite, coming soon.