Friday Freebie update from December 2005

Welcome back! It's been a couple weeks, but you'll like this freebie - I guarantee!Today's freebie comes from Autodesk. This past week Autodesk, the maker of CAD and GIS software, released its mapping server into the open-source community by joining up with the OSS map server group responsible for MapServer. Autodesk put its server side mapping software, based on a wealth of OSS components, into the hands of a newly created foundation, the MapServer Foundation. Autodesk will continue to provide financial and development support for the project. Two server side mapping projects are managed by the foundation: MapServer Cheetah (the original MapServer software) and MapServer Enterprise (Autodesk's server side geospatial software). Both are heavily based on open standards, and both are free for download at the MapServer Foundation web site.

While some geospatial data in the free version of MapServer Enterprise is read/write (such as ESRI), some sources are read only. Autodesk will be offering a commericial version of MapServer Enterprise in 2006, which will support read/write capabililties for additional geospatial data sources such as Oracle. If you need software to provide geospatial capabilities via the web, then check this offering out.If you find any comments in the MapServer code left by me, well, remember that I was much younger then! :-)