Boundless stack

Overview

"Boundless Geospatial" provided commercial support for open source geospatial software.

They put together an open source stack and then commercialized it. Then in 2018 Planet Labs bought them and they are gone. I think Planet just wanted a bunch of geoscience developers and had no interest in contributing to open source. They just want to tap it, like Esri.

Back a couple years ago I talked to Boundless at a FOSS4G conference and they seemed so bright-eyed and helpful. I am sad today because every time I find material about them I hit a paywall when I try to follow up on it.

This is the business model that works best for me, a passionate after-hours GIS tinkerer:

1. A free tier. Unsupported. Developers get access and I can stand up a server on my own with low traffic levels at no cost.
2. A mid-level tier for my clients, a reasonable $ subscription price and limited support.
3. An enterprise tier that costs $$$ with full support. I never work in this tier so the cost matters naught to me.

My impression is Boundless pretty much built up the GeoServer I have come to know and love.

They hit the top of their arc very early and are now serving only the Military Industrial Complex.

Github: The sea of lost projects

Github is a Sargasso Sea of projects and Esri and Boundless have thrown many into the morass. I have too but I am just some random guy using Github as place to tether my code so I can't misplace it. I am not claiming to be an Enterprise Leader. Anyway.

I tried a few boundless/* things until I was ready to give up. Things like boundless/composer with 100's of security faults. Things that won't build. Projects that depend on other projects. etc etc.

So. To be 100% fair, the code for the stack might or might not be out there.

What is in the Boundless stack?

1. QGIS on the desktop
2. Boundless Composer is for authoring maps
3. OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for building web maps.
4. GeoServer http://geoserver.org/ Front end for geospatial repository https://github.com/Geo-CEG/docker-geoserver
5. GeoGig http://geogig.org/ There is a GeoServer plugin for change management https://github.com/Geo-CEG/docker-geogig
6. GeoWebCache http://geowebcache.org/ will cache pre-rendered tiles coming from Geoerver
7. PostGIS Used as a data repository for GeoServer but capable of full SQL processing of spatial data.

See this page: Boundless committed to open source and their github page: https://github.com/boundlessgeo (where you will find they have committed code but failed to maintain it.)

I would consider adding OpenDataKit to this stack.

Maybe VirtualBox will work

...or maybe when I look for it I will hit a paywall. :-(

How building GeoNode fails

Download and build

cd source/docker
git clone [email protected]:boundlessgeo/geonode.git
cd geonode
docker-compose build

This build includes

• postgres
• elasticsearch (had to modify the compose file as there is no elasticsearch:latest tag, I used 6.6.0)
• rabbitmq
• django
• celery
• geoserver (built on tomcat 9)
• geonode (built on geonode/nginx)
• ArcREST

It keeps its data in a data container called geoserver_data_dir

docker-compose up
.
.
.
Creating geonode_rabbitmq_1      ... done
Creating geonode_postgres_1      ... done
Creating geonode_elasticsearch_1 ... done
Creating geoserver_data_dir      ... done
Creating geonode_geoserver_1     ... done
Creating geonode_celery_1        ... error
Creating geonode_django_1        ... error

Who needs django and celery anyway? Oh right -- that's basically the underpinnings what I wanted to test today, geonode. That makes Boundless currently a non-starter. Trying GeoNode official version instead!

There's a quote regarding open source about "the smartest people don't work in your company" and I think that's true about Boundless. OKAY to be fair, I could spend perhaps another day and get it going. But I just don't know if I even want to use GeoNode yet. I probably don't.

The thing is, if I contracted with Boundless doubtless I could spend 4 hours on the phone and they'd help me set it up, but first I'd have to be convinced I was not just substituting Boundless for ESRI and just beholden to a new master.