30 years of MapGuide (Open Source)

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This year MapGuide is 30 years old. Even though it isn’t the most popular geospatial project, it is still worth taking a look at. You might have noticed I put “Open source” between brackets, that’s because it started as proprietary software, but later on was made open source.

If I go to a FOSS4G conference and I mention to people that I use MapGuide, their reaction usually is that they never heard of it. So it might be a good idea to tell you a bit about the history and properties of MapGuide Open Source.

What is MapGuide?

According to the OSGeo website “MapGuide Open Source is a web-based platform that enables users to develop and deploy web mapping applications and geospatial web services.” But what does that mean? In short it means that MapGuide is a graphical engine that creates maps that can be used in web-based GIS applications.

Those applications can be developed in .net, php or Java. If you install MapGuide it will also install some examples on how it can be used, but you can also develop your own applications that use the Mapguide maps.

Geo-IT bv, the company I work for, combines Mapguide with OpenLayers to create a web-based GIS application for our costumers. These two are combined with PostGIS as a data source and that results in an application that is widely used by governments and companies in Belgium. We also make a version for our clients that they can use to offer geospatial information to a wider audience. The municipality of Edegem, for example, where I previously worked, uses it to inform their inhabitants about all kinds of things.

History

1995: Argus MapGuide

In November 1995 it was released as Argus MapGuide by Argus Technologies in Calgary, Alberta. At the time it was proprietary software.

1996: Autodesk MapGuide

In the fall of 1996 MapGuide was sold to Autodesk and the software was released as Autodesk MapGuide 2.0. Autodesk kept developing it until version 6.5. In spring 2004 people at Autodesk started preparing MapGuide Open source and in march 2006 it was released as an open source project under de LGPL license. With this version they also stopped using ActiveX, that was used in the old MapGuide.

2006: Mapguide Open Source and OSGeo

In march 2006 version 1.0.0 was released as open source software. MapGuide uses FDO (“Feature Data Object”) to access data from different data sources. FDO was another Autodesk project that also became an open source project at the same moment as MapGuide.

The reason both projects became open source on that moment was according to Autodesk because their “developers and customers had been demanding for faster innovation of their web mapping solutions, more frequent software releases and lower cost of entry and ownership”. They also wanted “to help make map serving technologies more readily available for widespread adoption”. Because then they were already the big, bad, commercial software company in the CAD world, but they also wanted to have more contacts in the GIS world by going open source and they also tried to build a community around them.

On March 6, 2006 MapGuide Open Source was one of the founding projects of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and Autodesk was an important partner in that founding. Gary Lang of Autodesk became, as representative of Mapguide, one of the directors on the first board of OSGeo. In the beginning Autodesk was an important supporter of OSGeo. The founding projects of OSGeo were MapGuide, GeoTools, Mapbender, MapBuilder, MapServer, GDAL/OGR, GRASS and OSSIM. Soon after that FDO also became an OSGeo project.

After a successful incubation process MapGuide Open Source graduated to become a full fledged OSGeo project in april 2007. In 2008 FDO also graduated as an OSGeo project.

At first Autodesk also kept maintaining a proprietary version under the name Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise, that was later renamed to Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server. From this dual licensing system, from the legal department of Autodesk, nobody expected any profits, but quite a lot of companies kept paying the license fees for the commercial version, because they assumed this way they could sue someone, if something went wrong. This proprietary version existed parallel to the MapGuide Open source version until 2018.

Today

Currently MapGuide Open source is released under the LGPL 2.1 license. Even though it isn’t an Autodesk project anymore, it still contains some parts of that history, mainly because FDO is still used to load data into the software. In the example of the municipality of Edegem I mentioned earlier for example, you can still add your own DWF files. DWF is an older geospatial format developed by Autodesk.

To this day the software is still developed and the current version is 3.1.2. Version 4.0.0 is on it’s way, since a beta2 version was made available last summer.

Nowadays MapGuide is more an ecosystem of different solutions that work together. A lot of information is posted on the blog “The MapGuy(de)” by Jackie Ng the main developer of MapGuide.

Mapguide Maestro

MapGuide Open source is a server application that is managed by a piece of software called MapGuide Maestro. It is used to change the look and feel of your map layers and also to manage the order and organization of layers in maps.

MapGuide uses it’s own “language” to create for example the contents of labels or popups. It isn’t that difficult, but some of the functions I haven’t seen anywhere else, but more about that I will tell in a later blog post.

Why do I use MapGuide?

The answer is simple: the company I work for uses it. I first started using it at the end of 2016 when I was still working for the municipality of Edegem. We then became a client of Geo-IT bv and they offered a web-based GIS solution based on MapGuide. There I didn’t use it very often, because I mainly used QGIS and pgAdmin to manage my geospatial information, but most of my co-workers used it and I had to manage the data in MapGuide Maestro for them. Since the beginning of 2024 I changed jobs and I started working for Geo-IT bv, so these days I use MapGuide all the time to support our customers.

So the real question is why does the company I work for use MapGuide? Well they started using it in 2005 when the company was founded, so at the time MapGuide wasn’t open source yet. Geo-IT is also a reseller for Autodesk software, so the most logical thing to do at the time was using Autodesk MapGuide as the backbone for their GIS application. A little later Mapguide became open source and the GIS solution Geo-IT made, migrated to MapGuide Open Source. Of course this isn’t the only reason MapGuide is used. The main reason is it’s made to create your own applications around it, and that’s just what we do at Geo-IT bv.

To end I would like to thank Bart De Lathouwer and Wouter De Wilde who provided me with a lot of information about the history of MapGuide to write this article.

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