Congratulations to the OpenLayers development team on the release of OpenLayers 2.11!

This release is a big one, closing over 380 outstanding tickets and providing significant performance improvements. The biggest win is the mobile support enhancements. OpenLayers now allows features to be dragged and zoomed with touch gestures on mobile devices. Handlers for pinching and zooming have also been added to the library.

Other key highlights are the plethora of performance enhancements and the additional support for accessing Bing Maps tiles. The release notes go into detail about all of the new features and you can see them in action on the OpenLayers demo site—to really get a feel for the improvements open the demo in a mobile browser.

OpenGeo is committed to the OpenLayers project and we’re eager to support it however we can. A good deal of the development was done by OpenGeo team members Tim Schuab, Andreas Hocevar and Bart van den Eijnden in February as a part of the code sprint hosted by Camptocamp and Swisstopo. That week in Switzerland proved to be a critical step forward in pushing mobile enhancements and the 2.11 release to completion. A full recap of the sprint is accesible from Tim’s post on the OpenLayers blog.

Thanks again to the OpenLayers team, the supporters of the code sprint and everyone who has contributed to this new release!

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.

Last week I was in Japan, attending the FOSS4G.JP events put on by OSGeo Japan in Tokyo and Osaka. The enthusiasm of the local community was infectious, as was the FOSS4G montage.

In Tokyo, I presented my talk on open source economics, “Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts“; in Osaka, the more technical “State of PostGIS“.

One thing that the experience made clear to me was the need to press forward with localizing the OpenGeo Suite so that our local partners (Orkney and MapConcierge) can more easily evangelize. English is nice as a universal language of commerce, but when it’s time to learn and build, you have to meet people where they live and in their own language.

Thanks to new partners Orkney and Mapconcierge, the OpenGeo Suite now has local support in Japan and will soon have Japanese language support. OpenGeo’s Chris Holmes, Toru Mori of Orkney, and Taichi Furuhashi of Mapconcierge signed partnership agreements today at FOSS4G in Barcelona.

OpenGeo welcomes partners that offer geospatial web services expertise and share our mission, and this is another step towards increased support for our worldwide user base.

In June, OpenGeo announced our initial partnership with Spatialytics in Canada. Today, we are launching the official OpenGeo Partner Program, our new, international network of service providers. We are aiming to bring more people into the open source ecosystem by aligning the financial incentives of consultants and solution providers with those of core software developers. Through our partner network, OpenGeo will offer OpenGeo Suite clients a wealth of proven technology solutions that solve real-world challenges.

There has been great interest in the OpenGeo Suite from around the world since its launch almost a year ago, from end users and solutions providers alike. We feel that the best way to foster greater access to the OpenGeo Suite is in collaboration with organizations that share our values and offer outstanding solutions expertise to end users. Our Partner Program will expand the capabilities of these solutions providers by giving them a complete, certified, and fully supported open source geospatial stack backed by core experts on PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers and GeoExt.

Read more about our Partner Program.

OpenGeo managers and technical staff will be in attendance at FOSS4G, the leading conference for open source geospatial software, in Barcelona, Spain, September 6 – 9. Stop by booth #15 if you are interested in discussing partnerships and plans for the OpenGeo Suite.