Our Philosophy
A “dot org”.
OpenGeo is a new type of organization, a “dot org” that draws on the best of the for-profit and non-profit worlds to create a hybrid. Our goal is to make geospatial information more open: publicly available, accessible on compelling platforms that people want to use.
To achieve our goal, we build geospatial tools and make them available to everybody. Our software makes it easy for any organization to get their geospatial information on the web in open formats, and interoperable services.
Although OpenGeo is a nonprofit, we compete in the market for contracts like a traditional company. Our nonprofit status ensures that we re-invest all of our profit and remain true to our mission.
Some social enterprises choose a business model that maximizes revenue in a traditional way and then gives the profits to good causes. Our goal is to naturally align our incentives, favoring revenue models that bring in money only when they also further our mission in some way. This allows us to focus all of our energy on the goal that all our clients care about: producing truly great software.
A community partner.
Our products are built by open source communities.
We nurture those communities, by employing core developers, and giving our developers the time to address community issues during their work.
Our clients sometimes find it hard to interface with open source communities. Who to talk to for a new feature? How to submit a patch?
Through our core community members, we provide an interface to the open source community process.