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Free Software

What is free software?

Free software is software that gives you, the user, the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free (as in freedom).

Free software gives user 4 basic freedoms:

  • Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
  • Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
  • Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
  • Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Personal Involvement and Contributions

Official member of:

  • OSGeo - The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.

  • OGC - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 478 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards.

  • openSUSE project - a community project to produce, improve and document the openSUSE GNU/Linux distribution and make it the "world's best GNU/Linux distribution"

  • foss.ntua - Free and Open Source Software community of the National Technical University of Athens.

Developer/Contributor to the following Free Software projects:

  • OSGeo-Live - a self-contained bootable DVD based on Lubuntu, that allows users to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around. It provides pre-configured applications for a range of geospatial use cases, including storage, publishing, viewing, analysis and manipulation of data. It also contains sample datasets and documentation.
    Release Manager and Developer since version 5.5.

  • pycsw - an OGC CSW server reference implementation written in Python.
    pycsw implements clause 10 (HTTP protocol binding - Catalogue Services for the Web - CSW) of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification, version 2.0.2. pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata. Existing repositories of geospatial metadata can be exposed via OGC:CSW 2.0.2. pycsw supports ISO Application Profile and INSPIRE Discovery Profile.
    OSGeo Project Officer, Member of Project Steering Committee (PSC) and Core Developer.

  • data.gov - Data.gov open data catalog is based on pure open source stack involving CKAN and pycsw as the CSW implementation. More information on Data.gov Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) API and on GitHub
    CSW Developer.

  • openSUSE - the openSUSE GNU/Linux distribution.
    Maintainer of official geospatial Application:Geo repository.
    Maintainer of more than 25 free and open source software packages through OpenSUSE Build Service personal repository.

  • PublicaMundi - Scalable and Reusable Open Geospatial Data. PublicaMundi is an EU FP7-ICT Project based on CKAN aiming to extend it as a geospatial catalogue. PublicaMundi is open source and powers the official Greek Open Geospatial Data portalgeodata.gov.gr
    Scientific and Technical Coordinator, Core Developer.

  • Orfeo Toolbox - a C++ library for remote sensing image processing.
    ORFEO Toolbox (OTB) is distributed as an open source library of image processing algorithms. OTB is based on the medical image processing library ITK and offers particular functionalities for remote sensing image processing in general and for high spatial resolution images in particular. OTB is distributed under a free software license CeCILL (similar to GPL) to encourage contribution from users and to promote reproducible research. Most functionalities are also adapted to process huge images using streaming and multi-threading as often as possible.
    Core Developer.

  • Zoo Project - ZOO is a open source OGC WPS (Web Processing Service) implementation. It provides an OGC WPS compliant developer-friendly framework to create and chain WPS Web services.
    Member of Project Steering Committee (PSC) and Core Developer.

  • GeoNode - GeoNode is an open source application and platform for developing web based Geospatial Information Systems and for deploying interoperable Spatial Data Infrastructure.
    Core Developer.

  • OWSlib - OWSLib is a Python package for client programming with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web service (hence OWS) interface standards, and their related content models.
    Core Developer.

  • UbuntuGIS - Project dedicated to keeping Ubuntu up to date with a suite of the best Geospatial Open Source Software.
    Maintainer.

  • MapServer - MapServer is an Open Source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web.
    Packager.

  • QGIS - QGIS is a Free and Open Source Geographic Information System.
    Developer/Contributor of various QGIS plugins including MetaSearch (core QGIS plugin), DigitizingTools, CADTools.

  • GRASS GIS - GRASS GIS is a free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) software suite used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics and maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization.
    Packager.

Personal Free Software projects:

  • Gnorasi is an open source platform for remote sensing image analysis and processing. Its goal is to provide a knowledge-based environment for advanced image analysis, and an intuitive graphical environment for easily creating custom remote sensing applications. It is written in C++ and heavily based on OTB and Voreen.
    Core Developer.

  • MSEG is a generic region-based multi-scale image segmentation algorithm designed with some optimizations for remote sensing imagery. The algorithm can be used as a low level processing part of an object-oriented image analysis system.

  • GIMED is a metadata editor for geospatial data. It is focused on providing compliant metadata with the ISO19139 standard and INSPIRE directive.

  • cvAML is an implementation of the Anisotropic Morphological Leveling algorithm for remote sensing imagery using the OpenCV library.

Code

Last Updated 30/03/2015 by tzotsos