Coupling the development of a social ecosystem with the general goals of providing stability, marketing, and shared resources has helped make OSGeo an open source development success story. It brings together code, users and funding in a way that encourages further growth of solid products in an increasingly competitive business environment.
Removing barriers and finding common goals has helped to move forward not just geospatial technologies, but open source products in general. This provides more options to global organizations, helping them to avoid the risks of proprietary lock-in and black-box business services. (more>>)