Today sees the launch of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), a not-for-profit initiative to support and promote the development of open geospatial, or location-aware, technologies.

The organisation will serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit.

OSGeo held its first meeting in Chicago last month with 25 participants representing 18 groups and over 20 different open source geospatial projects, and 39 other parties participating via Internet Relay Chat.

The initiative draws governance inspiration from several aspects of the Apache Software Foundation, including a membership composed of individuals drawn from foundation projects who are selected on their active contribution to foundation projects and governance.

Initial OSGeo projects have been identified as GeoTools, Mapbender, MapBuilder, MapGuide, MapServer, Geospatial Data Abstraction Library/OGR, Grass, and Ossim.

The foundation will not require OSGeo software projects to be licensed under any one particular open source licence, but will require that all OSGeo software is released under an open source licence approved by the Open Source Initiative.